The Muse has been addressed in nearly every register this catalog has available. Here she is addressed in the register of witness. The poem is not a love poem and not quite a prayer. It is testimony, in the specific religious sense: a person standing up in a room to report what happened to him.

That framing controls every choice. “I’m a testament” is the pivot line, and the word carries both meanings at once, a legal document and a book of scripture. The speaker is offering himself as evidence. What he is evidence of is stated plainly two stanzas earlier: “The myth of spirit / the inspiration of a muse / is real.” The construction is unusual and deliberate. He does not say the muse is not a myth. He says the myth is real, which grants the mythological framing and then insists on its truth anyway.

The scriptural borrowing does structural work rather than decorative work. “Spirit gives birth to spirit” arrives introduced by “As we were taught,” a phrase that assumes a shared education between the speaker and the Lady. They sat in the same pews, or the same tradition. The line is then applied to a purpose its original context did not anticipate: a woman’s presence in the world of flesh becomes “the mother / of awakening.” Scripture describing spiritual rebirth is redirected to describe what she does to him.

The strongest moment is the smallest. “still in flesh— / trembling” isolates two words and lets them stand against the abstraction surrounding them. Everything else in the poem is spirit, elevation, awakening, divinity. Then a body, shaking. The poem needs that tremor, because without it the devotion floats free of anyone.

The closing citation is a problem the site should resolve before publication. The quoted phrase is John 3:6. John 3:16 is the far more famous verse about God’s love for the world, and the two are easily transposed. The wrong number sits at the bottom of the poem in the position of an authority, and readers who know their scripture will notice immediately. See the production note below.

Sincere and cleanly built, but it relies more on borrowed authority than on its own invention. Nineteen lines, and the two that stay with a reader are “I’m a testament” and “still in flesh— / trembling.” The rest works in vocabulary the devotional tradition has already worn smooth: luminous, spirit, elevating, awakening, divine. Those words arrive pre-loaded, which means the poem gets their weight without having to earn it.

The scriptural move is the piece’s real idea, and it deserved more development. Taking a verse about spiritual rebirth and reassigning it to a woman is a genuinely bold act of interpretation, close to blasphemy in some readings and close to Dante in others. The poem performs the substitution and then declines to examine it. A version that sat with the audacity — that acknowledged what it was doing with the text — would be considerably stronger.

The trembling line proves David knows this. It’s the one place the poem stops asserting and starts reporting, and everything around it is thinner by comparison. Rated below his usual standard not for failure but for caution.