This poem operates as a companion piece to “Incendium” and a philosophical expansion of “Inevitability”—the three forming an informal trilogy about love as physical force. Where “Inevitability” explored the black-hole pull and “Incendium” explored the fire, “Your Gravity” explores weightlessness: what happens when the fundamental force that keeps you grounded is replaced by a person. The opening question—”Why do I spoil thee?”—echoes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee?” but substitutes why for how, shifting from method to motive. The answer unfolds in layers: not for the spoils (reward), not for the promise (future), not for the mystery (intrigue), but for “that look you gift me, / the secrets you don’t tell me, / the hidden smile only I can see.” The distinction is crucial—he spoils her not for what she gives but for what she withholds, the things she doesn’t reveal, the smile only he can read. The gravity conceit arrives with casual force: “I feel different / beside you. / Like I can defy gravity, / not play by some physics / no one truly understands.” The aside—”no one truly understands”—is both scientifically honest (gravity remains the least understood of the fundamental forces) and emotionally precise: love, like gravity, is a force everyone experiences but no one can fully explain. The instantaneous departure of gravity—”that first moment / you gifted me / your beautiful smile”—is the poem’s origin story, and the word “instantaneously” is important: this was not gradual attraction but a phase transition, gravity switching off like a light. The floating that follows is described not as disorientation but as liberation: “an alternate universe” where the old rules don’t apply. The triple-“un” sequence—”unwritten / unbidden / undoable”—is formally elegant, each prefix undoing one more assumption about choice: this love was not written in advance, not invited, and cannot be reversed. The poem’s philosophical center arrives late: “I have always relied on, / trusted, / believed in, / the physics of gravity. / Now, / I realize / it’s unnecessary in my heart.” This is the poem’s most radical claim—the speaker has abandoned a fundamental law of nature and feels more stable, not less. The paradox is precise: without physical gravity he floats; with the Muse’s gravity he is held. The closing sections reprise “Incendium” explicitly—the Latin refrain, the fire imagery, the cremation—but with a crucial evolution. Where “Incendium” ended in ash and the Ice Queen’s chill rendered irrelevant, “Your Gravity” ends in ascent: “rise in a / pyro ascent / my soul turning into / sparkling embers. / My flame— / eternal / the stars in the sky.” The ash becomes embers, the embers become stars, and the final couplet—”We will both / rise on the pyre / of my obsession”—includes the Muse in the conflagration for the first time. In “Incendium,” the speaker burned alone; here, they burn together. The progression from solo immolation to shared pyre is the emotional evolution between the two poems. The five-AM sunrise closing—”watching the sunrise burn”—grounds the cosmic in the domestic: after all the physics and fire, the speaker is just a man awake too early, watching the sky change color because love won’t let him sleep.

A poem that succeeds by sustaining its physics metaphor through an impressive emotional range—from Shakespearean question to cosmic liberation to fire and pyre—without losing the thread. The gravity conceit is one of Plahm’s most developed extended metaphors: it works because the poem doesn’t just use gravity as a comparison but thinks through its implications. If the Muse removed gravity, then the speaker should be floating, untethered, directionless—and he is, but he experiences the floating as freedom rather than chaos, which redefines what gravity means. The old gravity (physics, routine, the previous existence) was a cage; the new gravity (the Muse) is a choice. The triple-“un” sequence is one of the poem’s tightest formal moments, and the declaration “This was not a choice / it was a requirement” cuts to the heart of the Muse relationship’s central paradox: compulsion experienced as liberation. The connection to “Incendium” through the Latin refrain is a smart structural choice that elevates both poems—”Incendium” becomes the origin of a fire that “Your Gravity” completes and transcends. The critical evolution from solo burning to shared pyre (“We will both / rise”) represents a maturation in the Muse dynamic: the speaker is no longer content to burn alone. The five-AM sunrise closing is the poem’s most grounded and most moving passage—after all the cosmic imagery, the poem returns to a man watching dawn, which is both the most ordinary and most beautiful thing a person can do. Where the poem occasionally loses momentum is in its middle sections, which revisit the gravity-as-liberation theme several times without always deepening it—”Today, / I live floating / effortlessly through a / universe of heavenly thoughts” restates what earlier stanzas have already established. The “I must be nuts— / writing a love letter, / almost, / at the closing of my door” is a vulnerable aside that could have been developed further—the idea that this is a man near the end of something, writing urgently because time is short. But the overall arc—from “Why do I spoil thee?” to “my gravity is you” to the shared pyre—is one of the most dramatically satisfying in the catalog, and the poem’s insistence that love reorganizes the laws of physics is stated with enough conviction and enough specific imagery to feel earned rather than hyperbolic. A poem that proves the strongest force in the universe isn’t gravity—it’s the person who replaces it.