The title is half a sentence. Venus is, and the next line finishes the thought: chasing the crescent moon. Read together the construction closes, which is why the site’s dual-title convention suits this poem better than most.

The opening is the surprise. A man stands before a tumbleweed at bedtime, trying to rejuvenate it with his stream of water. No polite reading of that line exists and Plahm has not supplied one. He put a joke about urinating in the first stanza of a poem that goes on to handle a planetary conjunction, and the joke turns tender rather than crude, because a tumbleweed is already dead. They detach at the root when they die. Rolling is what the corpse does. The ritual, then, is a man watering something beyond reviving, every night, before sleep.

That plant has appeared before. “I Was Once a Tumbleweed” made it a self-portrait. Here it gets promoted, and by the closing lines it has become “just another companion tumbleweed searching for a stillness at midnight,” a fellow traveler instead of a mirror. The speaker follows it toward North Dakota. Two rolling dead things keeping each other company.

Best writing in the poem is the middle stanza, and it works by ear. Hooves clip clop to rest. Lowing settles into sighs. Cook fires spark out, and the chuckwagon pot clinks and pings as it cools. Plahm inventories an entire camp going quiet, organizes it wholly by sound, and finishes on the most particular detail available, which is metal ticking as it contracts. Nobody writes that without having heard it.

Overhead, Venus drifts toward the cradle of the moon. Then the hope: “It will be closer, as I follow the tumbleweed, when we reach North Dakota.” Astronomically that is nearly wrong and not entirely. Traveling several hundred miles north genuinely shifts the moon’s apparent position against the background sky by a fraction of a degree, so a sliver of real physics props up what is mostly wishful thinking. The poem benefits from not knowing which it is doing.

Then Medora, which is no random pin on the map. The Marquis de Mores founded the town in 1883 as a cattle operation and named it for his wife. Plahm’s speaker is driving cattle toward a place a man built and named after the woman he loved, hoping his own Venus waits there. Known or stumbled into, that history puts the poem on precisely the right dot.

The animals keep everything honest. Queenie the protective Shelty and Shadow the Badlands zombie-eyed cat share the day’s last bowl of vittles, and zombie-eyed is not a phrase anyone workshops into a poem. It arrives already attached to a particular cat.

Slack appears in the stanza about thoughts dancing down the stream beneath a lonely, expansive midnight sky. Two adjectives are doing a noun’s job, and stream has already been spent twelve lines earlier on something else altogether. The poem runs long, and this passage is where the length shows.

Something else sits underneath all of it. Two days before this, “Nocturne Muse” declared that home lies inside her heart, found and settled. Home here is somewhere ahead, in North Dakota, at a ranch, unreached. The preface calls the poem a contemplative song about searching for Home. Both were written the same week, and only one of them has found it.

Ambitious and uneven, with the strongest passages very strong. The camp inventory is the high point: a whole cattle outfit going quiet, rendered through sound alone, closing on a chuckwagon pot ticking as it cools. That detail cannot be invented. Opening a planetary-conjunction poem with a man urinating on a dead tumbleweed is a real risk, and it pays, because the futility of the gesture sets up everything the poem later argues about searching. Queenie and Shadow earn their lines outright. Against that, the piece runs long, and the stanza about thoughts dancing down the stream goes soft where the rest stays specific, with two adjectives standing in for a noun and stream pressed into service twice for two unrelated things. Six or eight lines shorter, this would rate higher.