Fourteen lines that quietly refuse the standard geography of the afterlife.

“Not above, but here.” Four words, and an entire cosmology travels with them. Plahm has no interest in an elevated hereafter reached by ascent. What he wants is terrestrial and specific, a place with marigolds in it, catching the last low light of a day that is ending. The afterlife he builds has weather in it, and a time of day.

The flower is the right one, whether or not it was picked for the reason. Marigolds are what guides the dead home in Mexican tradition, the scent that marks the path back toward the living. They bloom late as well, holding on after most of the garden has given up, which places them at precisely the right point in the year for a poem set in failing light. And their heads are cup-shaped, so “cup the last low light” is doing botany alongside metaphor.

The real machinery sits in the tenses. He will slip from consciousness, will still dream, will wait. Every verb pushed forward. Then twice the poem breaks its own rule: her eyes are “already turned to meet mine,” and he waits for her to reach “the place I already rest.” The dying has not happened and the resting has begun. Those two instances of already are what earn the title. Close and now, rather than distant and later. Take the poem at its word and the wait started before the death did.

“Still” carries two meanings inside one line. I will wait, still, says both that he goes on waiting and that he waits without moving. Plahm seldom leans on that kind of doubling, and this one does not announce itself.

Set beside what came the day before, the poem gains a weight it does not carry alone. “Optimism is Viral,” dated 07-13, insists the Muse will find her cure and will not waste away. This one, written the following morning, assumes he goes first and settles in to wait for her. Mortality has appeared in the collection before, most directly in “Death,” and “Faith is a Self-Portrait” had gone up only three days earlier, arguing that belief is assembled rather than received. Close and Now is that argument put to use. Offered no afterlife he can accept, Plahm designs one, sets it at ground level, plants it, and moves in early.

The register slips once. “My Lady” reaches for a courtly formality the rest of the poem never asked for, and “forever after” sits near enough to a fairy tale ending to soften a close that had been holding firm.

The tense work is why this rates as high as it does. A poem that puts its own death in the future while insisting the rest has already started is attempting something harder than it appears, and Plahm brings it off with one repeated word and no explanation attached. Not above, but here states a position on the afterlife in four syllables that most poems would need a full stanza to reach. The marigolds are well chosen, by instinct or by intent, carrying funerary association, late-season bloom, and the literal cupped shape the line requires. Two soft spots hold it back from higher. My Lady imports a courtliness the poem has not built toward, and forever after closes a disciplined piece on a phrase borrowed from fairy tales. Short, controlled, and among the strongest small poems in the recent work.