The poem opens with the oldest memento mori in the language—”Life is short”—and immediately personalizes it with an image of cognitive decline: “Someday soon I’ll be so old / I can’t remember my own name.” The “soon” is the line’s sharpest word, converting the abstract inevitability of aging into something imminent, something the speaker can see approaching. But the next line performs the poem’s central act of defiance: “But, I will never forget your smile.” Memory will fail everywhere except the one place it matters. The name will go; the smile will stay. The hierarchy is declared in three lines: identity is expendable; the beloved’s smile is not.

The missed-boat confession is the poem’s most emotionally exposed passage: “We missed the boat / The big cruise / What set sail / Was a history ago.” The cruise metaphor is both literal enough to picture (a ship, a departure, a dock left standing) and metaphorical enough to ache (the relationship that should have been, the voyage never taken together). “A history ago” is a Plahm coinage that compresses the distance—not years ago or decades ago but a history ago, as if the missed opportunity belongs to a previous civilization rather than a previous chapter.

“So many tales between lost / What should have been / What could have been / We will never know” is the poem’s most honest stanza and its most restrained. The speaker doesn’t dramatize the loss or assign blame; he simply names the unknowable: the alternate timeline where the boat was caught, the cruise was taken, and the tales were shared rather than lost between. The restraint is the grief.

Then the pivot: “But, It’s Easter.” Two words, a comma, a season. Easter arrives as both calendar fact and philosophical argument—if resurrection is possible for a deity, then renewal is possible for a relationship. “A rebirth and renewal / A future untold to unfold” uses the fold/unfold wordplay that recurs across the catalog (“Perfectly Upside Down,” “Fluidly Fractured,” the origami thread): the future is a folded thing waiting to be opened, and Easter is the occasion for opening it.

The closing achieves the poem’s most memorable formal move. “Smile / That beautiful smile / Laugh / That beautiful laugh” uses the imperative followed by its own echo—the command and the description are the same gesture, the poem asking for the smile while already seeing it. “I will see and feel that / Even after I’m gone” extends the opening’s defiance past death itself: not just remembering the smile while alive but perceiving it after dying.

The final line—”Art is long. Your art, you, is forever”—invokes Ars longa, vita brevis (Hippocrates via Seneca), the aphorism that art outlasts the artist. But Plahm performs a crucial substitution: the Muse is not the artist; she is the art. Her existence—her smile, her laugh, her presence—is the artwork that will outlast both of their lives. The comma-splice “Your art, you, is forever” is grammatically awkward and emotionally precise: the art and the person are the same thing, inseparable, and the sentence structure fuses them by refusing to choose between them.