The epigraph is the poem’s alibi and its best joke. “What we offer the world bears our character” is the kind of sentence that belongs above a fireplace, and David places it above eighteen lines about defecation. Read straight, it’s a moral maxim. Read against what follows, it becomes literal in the least dignified way available. Both readings are live for the entire poem, which is the whole trick.

The logging conceit is maintained without a single break. Logs, timber, sawdust, lumberjack, the woods — every image in the poem comes from one trade, and the trade is chosen because its central action is a controlled fall. “Timber!” is what you shout when something large comes down on purpose.

Two lines carry more than their subject requires. “The logs I gift / sturdy, truthful, substantial, shaped for clean / disposal” runs a list of four adjectives, and truthful is the one that doesn’t belong with the others. Sturdy and substantial describe mass. Truthful describes character, which pulls the epigraph back into play. A man is claiming honesty for his output, and the pun is that the output is honest in the way only a body can be — involuntary, unperformed, entirely without pretence.

“A sovereign constitutional” is the finest phrase here and it holds three meanings at once. A constitutional is a walk taken for health. Sovereign gives it a throne, which the previous line has already supplied in porcelain. And a constitution is a founding document, which makes the whole business a matter of governance. Three registers — medical, royal, political — compressed into three words.

“The eye of the septic keeping watch” personifies the fixture as an observer, and the circling that follows is described with real attention: “once, twice, then— / disappears in a cerulean vortex.” Cerulean is a painter’s blue, a word from the high end of the colour vocabulary, applied here to toilet water. The mismatch between the register of the word and the thing it describes is the poem’s method in miniature.

“A man’s pine-scented / sawdust wipe” completes the logging frame by converting the paper back into wood, which it was. And “ends in cleanliness” quietly lands on the proverb about cleanliness and godliness without stating it.

The closing question is the poem’s exit. “Where’s the bear in the woods?” inverts the oldest rhetorical question in this territory — normally asked to establish that something is obvious. Here the bear is missing, which means the speaker is asking who else is doing this, or possibly asking where the wildness went. Ending a comic poem on an unanswered question is a better instinct than ending on a punchline.

Comic verse is harder than it looks, and this is well built. The logging conceit never slips, every image is drawn from the one trade, and the poem is disciplined enough to end on a question rather than a punchline.

“A sovereign constitutional” is the standout — three words holding a walk, a throne, and a founding document simultaneously. “Cerulean vortex” works on the same principle, elevating the diction so far above the subject that the gap does the laughing.

The epigraph is what lifts this above a bathroom joke. Placing a genuine maxim about character at the top forces every subsequent line to be read twice, and the poem has an actual argument buried in it: what a body produces is the one thing about a person that cannot be curated. Truthful in the adjective list is where that argument surfaces.

Two limits. “Downstream of strong java” is the one image borrowed from outside the conceit, and the poem is tight enough elsewhere that the lapse shows. And the closing question, while structurally right, is slightly muddled — inverting a proverb about obviousness into a question about absence leaves a reader unsure which way to take it.