The poem builds by subtraction. Three genres are named and then dismantled, each losing the specific body part that defines it. Soul loses its pulse, rock loses its feet, jazz lifts its hands and finds nothing overhead. The anatomy is well distributed — heart, feet, hands — and by the third instance the reader is watching a body come apart rather than a list accumulate.

The jazz line is the best of the three and the strangest. “Jazz would lift its hands / and find heaven missing” describes a gesture that could be a soloist reaching, a preacher testifying, or a surrender. Jazz’s relationship to the sacred is real and the poem trusts the reader to know it, saying only that what the hands reach for is gone.

Then Chopin, and the poem changes method entirely. Instead of removing something, it adds: “Even Chopin heard you / in the hush between raindrops.” That places her a century and a half before the speaker, audible to a dead composer, and the specificity is doing quiet work. The Raindrop Prelude is the piece being invoked, and its famous feature is a single repeated note that persists under everything else — the drip that will not stop. David locates her not in the note but in “the hush between raindrops,” which is the silence the repetition creates rather than the sound itself.

“Minor key by minor key, / until the nocturne / learned your name” is the poem’s finest passage. Nocturnes are night pieces, and learning happens slowly here, one key at a time, so a form invented before either of them existed is described as gradually acquiring her. The verb is learned, not took or bore. The music had to study.

“You are the rhythm / perfection borrows / to tune the universe” is the poem’s largest claim and its weakest line. Borrowing is a good idea — perfection as a debtor rather than a possessor — but universe and perfection in the same breath push past what the preceding images had established, and the concrete raindrops are traded for abstraction.

The ending redeems the overreach by contradicting it. After twenty lines of cosmic scale, the poem shrinks to a single anxious question: “when your heart pounds, / I pray its beat / is meant for me— / not just to keep time / while the world / dances on.” Keeping time is what a rhythm section does, faithfully and impersonally, for whoever is dancing. The speaker has spent the whole poem calling her the rhythm of the universe, and then admits he would rather she were only his. The compliment and the fear are the same observation seen from two sides.

The Chopin stanza is the reason to publish this. Locating her in the silence between the raindrops rather than in the notes, and having the nocturne learn her name over time, is genuinely inventive writing that rewards a reader who knows the piece and costs nothing to one who doesn’t.

The three-genre opening is efficient and well distributed, with the jazz line the strongest of the set. Its ambiguity is productive rather than vague.

Two weaknesses, and they sit next to each other. “You are the rhythm / perfection borrows / to tune the universe” inflates past the scale the poem had earned, and “My life glows in gilded tones” is the most decorative line here — gilded is doing no work that lit isn’t already doing better in the following line.

The closing recovers well. Turning the universal rhythm back into an ordinary anxiety about whether her heart is beating for him is the right ending, and “not just to keep time” is a musician’s phrase used with precision. It’s the only moment in the poem where the speaker is smaller than his subject, and the poem needed one.