This is Plahm writing with the compression of a workshop manual and the vulnerability of a confessional. The crankshaft conceit opens the poem with industrial precision: “two pistons / pumping back and forth / on a crankshaft of friction— / the engine of us, / straining for ignition.” The mechanics are exact—a crankshaft converts the linear motion of pistons into rotational force, which means the “back and forth” of a relationship (argument, reconciliation, desire, retreat) is not wasted energy but the raw material for forward movement. The word “straining” is the key: the engine hasn’t caught yet. These two pistons are working, creating friction, generating heat, but the ignition—the moment the engine fires and the vehicle moves—hasn’t arrived. The relationship is all potential energy and no combustion.

The dream stanza is the poem’s most philosophical passage: “If dreams could dream, / would reality still matter? / Or would we idle forever / in imagined motion?” This is a nested recursion—a dream dreaming—that questions whether the relationship exists more in fantasy than in function. “Idle” is a perfect automotive verb: an engine that idles is running but going nowhere, burning fuel without producing movement, which is the poem’s fear about the relationship itself.

The knuckle-on-steel passage is the poem’s most physically honest moment: “I knocked on steel— / broke one knuckle, / bruised three.” The speaker has been banging on something that will not yield—whether the beloved’s resistance, the relationship’s impasse, or his own stubbornness—and the body has paid the price. The pivot to wood—”Perhaps I should try wood— / it’s warm, / it listens”—is a moment of practical wisdom disguised as a joke. Wood is organic, responsive, warm to the touch; steel is industrial, unyielding, cold. The relationship needs a softer point of contact.

The self-assessment stanza is the poem’s most vulnerable: “I’m not qualified / to judge myself— / yet here I am, / measuring scars / against your smile.” The verb “measuring” is precisely chosen—scars and smiles placed on the same scale, damage and beauty weighed against each other. The beloved is described in mechanical terms that carry emotional double meanings: “beautifully oiled” (smooth, frictionless), “your manner polished” (refined but also buffed to a reflective surface that reveals nothing), “a gleam without heat, / cold in its sincerity.” That last phrase—”cold in its sincerity”—is the poem’s most devastating oxymoron: the sincerity is real, but it arrives without warmth. She means it, but it doesn’t burn.

The closing question—”Where can we turn / this grinding into grace— / make friction / fuel love?”—converts the mechanical metaphor into its own solution. Friction isn’t the problem; friction is the raw material. An engine needs friction to function; a relationship needs difficulty to deepen. The final couplet—”A beautiful problem— / worth exploring”—refuses both despair and resolution, choosing instead the most honest possible stance: this is hard, it’s beautiful, and it’s worth continuing. The poem ends not with an answer but with a commitment to keep asking.

A poem that succeeds through the precision and consistency of its extended metaphor—the crankshaft conceit is sustained from first line to last, and every image earns its mechanical credentials while carrying emotional weight. The opening stanza’s engine imagery is technically accurate (crankshafts do convert linear piston motion into rotation, friction is essential to the process) and emotionally resonant (relationships do require the back-and-forth to generate forward momentum), which is the mark of a metaphor working on both registers simultaneously. The dream stanza’s “idle forever / in imagined motion” is the poem’s most intellectually ambitious moment, using the automotive term “idle” to describe a relationship that runs without moving—a compressed diagnosis that most therapy sessions take hours to articulate. The knuckle passage is bracingly physical: after the abstract machinery of the opening, the broken knuckle and bruised fingers land with the shock of actual pain, grounding the metaphor in the body. The steel-to-wood pivot is the poem’s wisest moment and its most understated—the suggestion that the speaker’s approach, not the relationship’s material, might be the problem is delivered as an aside but carries the weight of genuine self-correction. “A gleam without heat, / cold in its sincerity” is the poem’s most accomplished description of the beloved and one of the catalog’s most nuanced portraits of the Muse: sincere but cold, polished but impenetrable, beautiful but offering no warmth. This is not the Ice Queen of “Incendium” (who was distant and dramatic) but something more complicated—a person who is genuinely kind and genuinely unavailable, which is harder to write about and harder to live with. The closing “beautiful problem— / worth exploring” is the poem’s perfect landing: it refuses resolution (no ignition has occurred), refuses despair (the problem is beautiful), and commits to continued engagement (worth exploring). At this length—compact, disciplined, no digressions—the poem demonstrates that Plahm can match his sprawling epics with something tight and mechanically precise. A poem built like the engine it describes: every part working, nothing wasted, still straining for ignition.