This is Plahm’s most sustained meditation on the aging body since “Fluidly Fractured,” and where that poem compared the speaker’s cracking joints to cold porcelain, this one takes a gentler, more reverent approach: the body is not broken but inscribed. The opening—”Today, I touched the truth of time— / A braille of scars and ghostly script”—establishes the poem’s governing metaphor with immediate precision. “Braille” is the key word: the scars are not just visible marks but raised text that can be read by touch, which means the speaker’s history is legible to anyone who places their hands on his skin. The body is a book written for the blind—or for the intimate, for the person close enough to read by fingertip.

The parchment conceit is sustained across the entire poem with remarkable consistency. Each body part is a page, each mark a different kind of script: pimples at seventeen were the manuscript’s juvenile marginalia, now faded to “pale white spots”—the acne of adolescence becoming the age spots of elderhood, the same skin telling two stories separated by decades. The swollen knees are the poem’s most devotional image: “My knees swell / with the ache / of kneeling / to your beauty.” The swelling is arthritis, but the poem reframes it as the accumulated consequence of worship—knees worn out by decades of genuflection to the Muse. The carefree cuts from youthful building are “proud scars— / marks of adventure and toil,” and the word “proud” does double duty: the scars stand proud (raised above the surface, like Braille) and the speaker is proud of them (they represent a life of physical labor and courage). The tick bites that “still flame and itch” connect to the Alpha-Gal thread—the ticks that changed the poet’s life—and their persistence on the skin is both medical fact and biographical record.

The most tender stanza is the hands passage: “Hands once calloused / from hard work / now tremble— / tender, delicately caressing you.” The transformation from calloused to trembling is the poem’s compression of an entire life arc in four lines: the young man’s rough, capable, insensitive hands have become the old man’s shaking, sensitive, gentle ones. The trembling that might be read as weakness is reframed as tenderness—the hands shake because they are now capable of delicacy they couldn’t achieve when they were strong.

The poem’s most ambitious passage arrives in the closing stanzas, where parchment extends past life into death: “When time-worn skin / becomes the shroud / drawn over my coffin, / I’ll live on— / written on a tombstone / of marbled memory.” The skin-as-parchment metaphor survives the body’s death by transferring to marble: the tombstone is the final page, and the life inscribed on skin is now inscribed in stone. The closing—”I am parchment, woven in love, / still unrolling—line by line, / in the poetry / of faded scars”—is the poem’s most moving image: a scroll that hasn’t finished unrolling, a manuscript still being written even as the ink fades. The scars are fading but still readable, the parchment is ancient but still unrolling, and the poetry—the Honey Bee Bard’s entire project—is written not on paper but on the poet’s own body.