The numbers add to a hundred, which is the first thing worth noticing. Sixty-nine and thirty-one, and between them they account for one entire person.

The larger fraction is Norman Rockwell. A Sunday postcard on the road to church. Snow on a barbershop window with three old men arguing about nothing that matters. The porch light left burning, the crease pressed into a Sunday best, the extra plate laid at Thanksgiving in case somebody wanders in from the cold. A catalogue of mid-century American domestic virtue, assembled with real affection and no visible irony.

Then look at the grammar. He does not say he sets the extra plate. He says I am the extra plate. I am the scarf you didn’t know you needed. I am the steady hand at the bedside, the diploma on the wall, the trophy dusted weekly. The dependable two thirds of this man has stopped being a person and become a set of household objects that reassure other people, and the poem states it without comment, which makes the section considerably stranger on a second reading than a first.

The opening line has already given warning. I am perfectly undone in every way. Undone sits oddly at the head of a passage devoted to everything being in order, and it carries both unravelled and not yet finished. The stable portion announces its own instability inside six words.

Then the smaller fraction, and the register drops through the floor. Communion gets inverted at once: wine nobody ordered, poured from a cup no hand blessed, tasted and spat out at a mother’s table with no explanation ever given. She drinks from that glass anyway. The bitterness falls quiet into it and she drinks it anyway.

The call nobody wants turns out to be the sound of your own name spoken at an hour you weren’t ready for. That is a phone ringing at three in the morning, rendered as a sound rather than as a message, which is how it actually gets experienced.

A test comes back and resolves nothing. What the test measured never gets stated, and the poem is stronger for the omission, because being counted, one among many, describes any result that converts a person into a data point without handing them anything usable. My hand shakes, he adds. Uncontrollably. That word turned up two weeks earlier in a poem about the body speaking a language the mind cannot govern, and it does identical work here.

The title is what holds the halves together. A dichotomy divides into two, and unstable means the division refuses to stay put. He carries both up the stairs each night. Neither can be set down.

Then the ending, which is the best writing in the poem. Stay, he asks, and then declines to support the request with any promise of improvement. Not because I have become stable, but because staying is the only stable thing I have left to offer. The staying is the offer. Nothing stands behind it and he does not pretend otherwise.

The final line shrinks eternity to a size a person can actually carry. Forever, even if that only means tomorrow, asked for again. This arithmetic has been running for weeks. “Nocturne Muse” put it as tomorrow is forever. “While I Have Time” offered all the time I have left. Here the same equation becomes a negotiation, renewable nightly, its outcome genuinely in doubt.

Not everything holds at that level. The Rockwell catalogue runs long, and the I am constructions accumulate past the point where accumulation is still working. Doubt, instability, fear drops an abstract triad into a poem built almost entirely from objects, and my dream is loving you goes vague among lines that are elsewhere exact.

The most ambitious poem in the recent work and very nearly the most successful. Two labeled fractions summing to a hundred divide one man into the part that functions and the part that does not, with the title warning in advance that the division will not hold. The first section is a Rockwell catalogue built on a grammar worth attention, since he does not set the extra plate at Thanksgiving, he is the extra plate, and a man who has turned into the household objects that reassure other people is a far stranger figure than the wholesome surface lets on. Perfectly undone in the opening line undercuts the section before it has started. The ending carries the poem: staying offered as the only stable thing left, with no promise of improvement attached, and forever cut down to tomorrow asked for again. Length is the cost. The first section accumulates past the point of effect, doubt, instability, fear drops an abstract triad into a poem otherwise made of objects, and my dream is loving you goes soft where the surrounding lines are precise.