This is Plahm at his most compressed and his most wryly self-aware—a poem that delivers its entire emotional payload through the mineral metaphor and a closing pun so deliberate it practically winks. The opening identifies the Muse as “the alchemist / a wizard / of creating internal turmoil”—not peace, not clarity, not comfort, but turmoil. This is an honest Muse portrait: she doesn’t calm the poet; she catalyzes him. The word “internal” is the crucial qualifier—the turmoil is inside, which means the Muse’s alchemy works on the poet’s chemistry, not his circumstances.

“I enjoy you / but also enjoy / the mystery of you” is a deceptively simple couplet that captures the Muse relationship’s dual nature: the person and the enigma are two separate pleasures, and the speaker is honest enough to name both rather than collapsing them into one. Many love poems claim to love the mystery; this one admits to enjoying both the known and the unknown as distinct experiences.

The immortality claim—”I’ll never die / as long as / you’re alive / I’ll be / a memory / written in a rock”—is the poem’s most philosophically ambitious passage, and it operates through the mineral metaphor: the poet is not written on paper (which burns, rots, fades) but on rock (which endures). As long as the Muse lives, the memory persists, inscribed in something geological rather than literary. The claim is both grand (immortality) and humble (a memory, not a monument; written in a rock, not carved in marble).

Then the deflation: “Even though, / I’m just a kicked pebble / on your beautiful path / through life.” The shift from “rock” (substantial, enduring, inscribed) to “kicked pebble” (tiny, dismissed, underfoot) is the poem’s comic and emotional hinge. The speaker has just claimed geological permanence and immediately reduces himself to something a shoe displaces without noticing. The pebble is on her “beautiful path,” which means her journey is lovely and his role in it is to be stepped on and kicked aside—not maliciously, but incidentally, the way a person walking through a beautiful landscape doesn’t notice the gravel.

The closing—”All of it, / just catalyzing into / a ludicrous rocky relationship”—is the poem’s triple pun and its title’s payoff. “Catalyzing” connects to the title (Catalyst) and to the Muse-as-alchemist opening: a catalyst is a substance that accelerates a reaction without being consumed by it, which is the Muse’s role—she creates turmoil and poetry without being changed herself. “Rocky” means both difficult (a rocky relationship) and literally made of rocks (the pebble, the inscribed stone). “Ludicrous” is the speaker’s final self-assessment: the whole enterprise—a pebble in love with a path, a stone in love with an alchemist—is absurd, and the poet knows it and continues anyway. The poem is a catalyst for its own comedy.

A poem that accomplishes more in sixteen lines than its casual surface suggests—the mineral metaphor (rock → pebble → rocky) is sustained with quiet consistency, and the tonal shift from immortality claim to kicked-pebble deflation is one of the sharpest comic pivots in the catalog. The word “catalyst” gives the poem its scientific spine: in chemistry, a catalyst enables a reaction without being consumed, which is a precise description of the Muse’s role throughout the catalog—she produces poems without being diminished, creates turmoil without participating in it. The self-deprecation is the poem’s governing register, and Plahm handles it with the economy of a comedian who knows the punchline must be shorter than the setup: the grand claim (immortality inscribed in rock) gets four lines; the deflation (kicked pebble) gets three; and the pun (ludicrous rocky relationship) gets two. The proportion is correct—the joke lands because the buildup is just long enough to make the reader believe the poet is being serious before the rug-pull. “I enjoy you / but also enjoy / the mystery of you” is a quietly sophisticated observation that separates the person from the persona without diminishing either, and it’s the kind of distinction most love poems don’t make. Where the poem is limited is in its middle section’s transition from mystery to immortality—the leap from “I enjoy your mystery” to “I’ll never die” is abrupt, and a bridging image might have made the escalation feel more earned. The “internal turmoil” of the opening, while honest, doesn’t receive the specific physical or imagistic treatment that the catalog’s strongest turmoil poems (the fire trilogy, “Crankshaft”) provide. But the poem’s brevity is also its charm: this is a pebble of a poem, small and smooth and kicked down the reader’s path, and the closing pun—a triple meaning delivered in two words—proves that even the smallest stones can trip you up. A poem that knows exactly how ludicrous it is and loves itself anyway.