Sixteen lines, and the grief in them attaches to something that never happened.

The opening puts two vessels on opposite headings. Plahm is sailing out while she sails in, and the only contact is visual, partial, and brief: wind-blown hair glimpsed through mist. Nothing is said. Nothing can be, at that distance and that speed.

Then the poem asks its question. “What sandbar could we meet at?” What follows reads like recollection but is entirely conditional, a scene assembled from things that were never done. Toes in the same sand. One glass sweating between two palms. The count is deliberate and it carries the intimacy: one lime, two straws, two people sharing a single drink because the sharing is the whole point. Plahm has long been better with a number than with an adjective, and the arithmetic here does more than any description of the closeness would.

The turn comes in the last stanza and it is a strange one. “I miss the footsteps we left in the sand.” But the night was never claimed. The tide took it back before it happened. There are no footsteps to miss. The poem mourns a counterfactual in the past tense, which is logically impossible and psychologically exact, because that is how a person actually grieves a chance not taken. The thing never occurred and the loss is real anyway.

“Already” gets a line to itself. One word, isolated, accelerating the erasure so the footprints vanish before the poem has finished describing them.

Set beside “Confluence,” which went up eight days before this was written, the pairing sharpens. That poem watched two rivers braid into a single channel. This one watches two vessels miss. Water has run through the catalog for years, from “Ripples of Truth” to “Traveling on the Stream” to “My Portmanteau,” and the passing-ships conceit was handled outright in “Ships That Pass In The Night.” What separates this one is the refusal to console. The earlier poem asked whether missing was their story. This one has stopped asking.

Economical and controlled. Sixteen lines with nothing wasted, and the central move, grieving a night that never happened, is performed without being explained. That restraint is the harder choice and the right one. The numbered detail in the middle stanza is the best writing here: one glass, one lime, two straws does more work than a full stanza of description would. Against that, the opening conceit of two ships passing is well-worn ground the catalog has already covered, and the poem leans on it rather than complicating it. The closing stanza is what earns the piece its keep.