Three languages get named, and then a fourth thing turns up that is not a language at all.

The mouth handles what is public: English, French, whatever the table requires. The mind runs a private tongue nobody else hears. Both belong to the ordinary division between what a person says and what a person thinks. Then Plahm introduces the body and the categories break. It speaks uncontrollably, “known to me and those who closely observe,” which leaves it neither public nor private but something with no name available.

He supplies one. “My nonprivate dialect.” The coinage is exact and slightly awkward, in the way real coinages are, because English has no word for a thing that is visible without being intended.

Watch the inversion performed on second language. Ordinarily the body is what a person starts with and speech is the acquired skill. Plahm turns that around. His mouth is fluent, his body is where he stumbles, and he grows uncomfortable in a tongue he has spoken since birth without ever having learned it.

The opening carries more than it seems to. A secondary conversation proceeds under the table, “ancient, almost buried, soon to be in the grave.” Under the table is literal, since that is where the legs are, and it is also the idiom for anything conducted out of sight. Ancient holds as well, because gesture predates speech by an unmeasurable stretch of evolutionary time. And soon to be in the grave is the plainest reading available: the body is going to die. Three meanings, one phrase, no strain.

Then the rib, where the poem stops being an essay about gesture. He presses a palm to a sore rib at dinner. Two dozen lines later that rib is Adam’s, “aching long before, for the first Muse.”

Genesis has Adam asleep while the rib is taken, feeling nothing. Plahm rewrites the scene so the ache comes first, before the surgery, before Eve exists at all, converting a story about loss into one about anticipation. The body knew what was coming while the mind lay unconscious. Applied back to a man twitching through a dinner party, that recasts every restless leg as information he has not yet decoded.

Calling Eve the first Muse is no throwaway either. The Muse has organized this collection for years, and a single line traces the entire lineage to Genesis, placing every Muse poem in the catalog inside a story about a man’s own body producing the woman he needs.

Ground is lost in the middle. The inventory of twitches runs eight or nine lines before anything turns, “It leaves me wondering” announces a wondering the poem is about to perform anyway, and “all languages” shrugs where the specificity of English and French had been working. Small faults, but they fall in exactly the stretch where a reader is waiting.

One pairing deserves notice. This was written the same day as “Subterfuge,” which asks how much he knows of her after seven years. Here the same question turns inward, and the answer is that his own body keeps “expressing what I don’t understand.” Two poems, one date, an identical problem approached from opposite ends.

The final ten lines carry this poem and they carry it a long way. Pressing a palm to a sore rib at dinner and arriving at Adam aching in advance of Eve is a leap most poems would telegraph before attempting, and Plahm simply makes it. His revision of Genesis is the sharpest move here, since scripture has Adam asleep and feeling nothing, while this version hands the body a foreknowledge the mind is denied. Nonprivate dialect is a genuine coinage, awkward the way useful coinages are, naming something English has left unnamed. Set against all that, the middle sags. Eight or nine lines of cataloged twitching pass before the turn, It leaves me wondering states what the following stanza is about to demonstrate, and all languages goes vague where English and French had been earning their keep. A strong poem with a slow approach.