Two poems in one, separated by nine decades, and the gap between them is the whole design.

The first half is set on a specific historical night. Glenn Miller, the band packing up, “the world war is over” — this is a dance hall in 1945, VE or VJ Day, the music that actually scored those celebrations. David doesn’t date it explicitly because he doesn’t need to; the details do the work. Miller’s orchestra was the sound of that war for a generation, which makes the setting instantly legible to anyone who knows the period and quietly poignant to anyone who knows Miller himself died in 1944, before the war ended. The band playing his closing number is playing without him.

The question that opens the poem is doing more than it appears to. “If I bow low enough… will you love me?” is a young man’s anxiety, phrased as a dance-floor courtesy. Everything in the first half is provisional, conditional, unsure — will the music inspire you, will you love me. He does not know yet.

“There are no judges, no judgements, / to rate who we are” is the first half’s thesis and the poem’s connective tissue to the rest of the catalog, which has returned repeatedly to the question of who is qualified to assess a life or a love. Here, on this night, the answer is nobody. The war is over and the usual arbiters are suspended.

Then the break, and the italic second half leaps “90+ years later.” The same couple, the provisional question long since answered. “A life filled, / With you” resolves the opening anxiety in three words — she did love him, the bow was low enough. What follows is a compressed ledger: “Love, lose, success, and failure. / showing in the cracks in my skin.” A whole life reduced to four nouns and a face, and the cracks are where the legacy is now stored.

“And the music still / Plays on” is the hinge between the two halves made explicit. The Glenn Miller number that opened the poem never stopped; it has been playing for ninety years, under everything. That is sentimental on its face and earns itself back with the final line, which is the best thing in the poem: “As I remember… // chasing you around the pool table at the bar.”

That last image rescues the whole piece from nostalgia. After the grand frame — a world war, ninety years, a legacy of emotion — the memory that actually surfaces is small, physical, faintly comic, and specific. Not the wedding, not the dance floor. Chasing her around a pool table. It is the detail a real person would remember, and its ordinariness is exactly why it convinces. The enormous historical setting was scaffolding; the pool table is the poem.

The structure is the achievement. Opening on a young man’s unanswered question in 1945 and answering it ninety years later in the same poem gives the piece a reach that its individual lines don’t have to carry alone. The Glenn Miller setting is chosen with real care — historically exact, instantly evocative, and quietly shadowed by the fact of Miller’s own death before that music’s biggest night.

The final line is what elevates the whole poem. After a world war and nine decades and a legacy of emotion, landing on a man chasing a woman around a pool table is the right instinct exactly — the specific, undignified, true memory that outlasts all the grand framing around it. It is the only concrete image in the second half and it does more than everything above it.

Two reservations. The first half’s “Celebrate! / The world war is over” states its occasion a little baldly, telling the reader what the Glenn Miller reference had already conveyed. And the second half’s “A legacy of emotion” is the one abstract phrase in a poem that is otherwise built from specifics — cracks in skin, a pool table, a closing number. It names the thing the images were already showing.