This is the most compressed and most synesthetically dense poem in Plahm’s catalog since “Perfume on a Stranger’s Coat”—a piece that crosses four senses in ten lines and then reveals it was born from a literal event: working late, wind howling, a tree falling in the dark. The poem’s power lies in the gap between the lyric meditation and the prosaic postscript, the collision between the imagined and the real.

The opening—”Hushed, I find— / knowing the sound / of a tree falling / in the dark shudder of night”—invokes the philosophical chestnut without naming it: if a tree falls and no one is there, does it make a sound? Plahm’s answer is that he was there, he heard it, and what he heard was not just sound but something that crossed every sensory boundary at once. The “dark shudder of night” is the poem’s first synesthetic crossing: night doesn’t shudder (that’s tactile), and dark doesn’t make noise (that’s visual), but the phrase insists they are the same experience.

The central passage is the poem’s most ambitious and most accomplished sentence: “I do not find it strange / to hear the perfume / of your beauty infused— / in every taste of silence.” In seven lines, four senses are crossed: hearing (hear), smell (perfume), sight (beauty), and taste (taste of silence). The sentence’s claim is radical: the Muse’s beauty has so thoroughly permeated the speaker’s perception that even silence has a flavor, even perfume has a sound, even a tree falling in a windstorm at night carries her presence. This is synesthesia not as a medical condition but as a state of love—the senses cross because the beloved has crossed every boundary of the speaker’s interior life.

“Untouchably / witnessed” is the poem’s two-word coda and its most paradoxical phrase. Touch is the one sense the synesthetic catalog has omitted, and it arrives only as a negative: untouchable. The beloved’s beauty can be heard, smelled, seen, and tasted—but not touched. She is witnessed but not held, perceived but not grasped. The italics set these two words apart as both whisper and thesis.

Then the postscript arrives like a bucket of cold water: “I was working late last night. / The wind was howling out of the northwest. / 20+ MPH gusts. / Not the first time in my life. Certainly not the last. / I heard a tree fall.” The shift from lyric to reportage is total—italics to roman, imagery to weather data, synesthesia to MPH. This is the poem’s bravest formal choice: it reveals that the entire lyric meditation was triggered by a mundane event (wind, tree, night), which either deflates the transcendence or deepens it. The tree actually fell. The sound was real. And the poet’s first thought, hearing it, was the Muse’s beauty infused in the silence that followed. The postscript doesn’t undermine the poem; it grounds it. The lyric isn’t fantasy—it’s what a mind saturated with love does with the sound of a tree crashing in a windstorm. Reality and transcendence occupy the same night.