This is Plahm at his most compressed and most exposed. The poem opens as a list of fantasies, each one a snapshot of longing dressed in spectacle: Vegas at night (chance), a slot about to spill (imminent reward), a ship on the horizon (distant promise), the slightest of touches (intimacy withheld to almost nothing). The catalog moves from the public and theatrical (neon, gambling, ships) to the private and sensory (touch, thought, stars, smile), tracing a path from the world’s fantasies to the speaker’s own. The em-dash after “your smile—” is the hinge: it suspends the smile in air before the poem pulls the floor away. “All of it / is a fantasy / in my mind” retroactively recategorizes everything—the Vegas lights, the ship, the touch, the smile—as interior events. Nothing in the catalog was real; it was all happening behind the speaker’s eyes. The question “So tell me— / are you real?” arrives with genuine urgency, not as rhetoric but as a man who can no longer distinguish between the beloved and the dream of the beloved. And the closing—”Or just / An echo”—is the poem’s quietest and most devastating word. An echo is a sound that was real once but now only exists as a diminishing repetition, each iteration fainter than the last. The Muse is not denied; she is feared to be fading. Coming immediately after “Ships That Pass In The Night,” this poem reads as the next chapter: the harbor wasn’t found, the ship sailed past, and what remains is a man in the desert asking the stars whether anything he felt was anything at all.

A poem that proves sixteen lines can hold the weight of an entire relationship’s uncertainty. The catalog opening is shrewdly constructed: each image is a different species of fantasy—gambling (chance), ships (hope), touch (desire), stars (wonder), a smile (love)—and the diversity prevents the list from flattening into monotony. The movement from public spectacle (Vegas) to private sensation (the slightest of touches) mirrors the way fantasy itself operates: it begins with borrowed imagery and ends in the body’s own longing. The em-dash after “your smile—” is the poem’s structural masterpiece, creating a pause that feels like the moment before a verdict. “All of it / is a fantasy / in my mind” lands with the force of a confession rather than a philosophical observation—this is a man admitting that the richest experiences of his emotional life may be self-generated. The closing question is honest enough to hurt: “are you real?” is not a metaphysical puzzle but a lover’s plea, and the alternative—”Or just / An echo”—is more terrifying than absence because an echo implies the original sound existed once and is now fading beyond recovery. The capitalized “An” at the start of the final line gives “echo” a formal weight, as if naming a condition rather than describing a sound. Where the poem’s brevity is both its power and its limitation: the desert-sky image connects to the broader catalog’s desert motif (the wandering disciple of “Barefoot in the Grass,” the devil’s breath landscape) but doesn’t have space to develop the connection. But the compression is the poem’s argument: fantasy is brief, intense, and dissolves on contact with the question “are you real?” A poem that asks and refuses to answer—which is the only honest response to its own question.