Nearly every line is a pun and the poem never once breaks character.

Lady Muse walks in and her heels sound like a hammer cocking, the sharpest thing here and it arrives in the second line. Sound turns into threat, and everything follows from that. Her smile disarms him before she draws. The dress reads like classified material. She hands him a martini and a motive, and he drinks both without checking for poison, which is trust rendered as a failure of tradecraft.

The trained man is the engine of the joke. They taught him to read a room, exits and angles and who is armed, and he reads her instead and liquidates his assets. That phrase works two ways at once, since liquidating assets means selling everything you own and it also means killing your own agents, and both descriptions fit a man in this condition.

The best move is structural. A leather case holding secrets worth killing for sits in the corner of the scene, forgotten the instant she passes by. Every spy story ever filmed is about retrieving that case. Plahm leaves it on the floor and walks off, staging the poem’s argument instead of announcing it.

Seven years turns up again, logged here as seven years on this op. The number has now surfaced across five poems since the beginning of June, functioning less as a fact about a marriage than as a fixed coordinate the work keeps steering back toward.

Her name changes again as well. Lady Muse is new, following my Lady in a poem about dying and my sweet Dutchie in one about falling asleep. Plahm keeps a wardrobe of titles for the same woman and picks according to occasion. The espionage register gets the compound with a rank in it.

This is the second costume in as many weeks. A cattle drive dressed the identical subject in western clothes on the eighteenth, and thirteen days later she is in a hotel bar holding a martini. Genre serves as a delivery system in both, and the woman inside it stays exactly the same.

What the poem lacks is a turn. The conceit gets established early, sustained with real skill, and elaborated to the finish without ever complicating itself, so by the last third a reader can predict the shape of each line before reading it. Debriefs me with one glance is the most available joke in the whole vocabulary. The closing epigram reaches past its grasp too. Some secrets don’t survive, not because they are hidden, but because they are loved wants to be the line everyone quotes, but the logic softens under any pressure, and the poem has just spent four lines insisting he never wants to be declassified, which points the other way entirely.

High craft applied to a single joke, held for thirty-eight lines without a break in character. Heels on tile like a hammer cocking is first-rate and lands in line two, while a martini and a motive is the best zeugma in the recent work. The strongest move is structural rather than verbal: a leather case of secrets worth killing for sits in the corner and gets forgotten the moment she walks past, which stages the argument instead of stating it. Holding the score is the absence of any turn. The conceit is set up early and then elaborated without complication, so the method becomes predictable well before the end, and debriefs me with one glance is the most obvious joke the vocabulary had available. The closing epigram also overreaches, since secrets not surviving because they are loved contradicts the four lines just spent insisting he never wants to be declassified.