This is one of the most visually precise poems in the catalog—a fifteen-line sketch that captures a single moment of seeing and wanting with the economy of a film director calling “cut.” The opening is pure cinema: “A lovely visage / of beauty / walking towards me—” The em-dash suspends the approach, holding the reader in the moment of anticipation. Then the reverse shot: “still a 9++ / walking away.” The “9++” is deliberately non-poetic—it’s a rating, a number, the language of casual male appraisal—and its bluntness is the point. The poet isn’t pretending to be above the physical; he’s admitting that the first response to beauty is scoring it, and then the poem goes to work on what lies beyond the score. “Her curves argued / with gravity / and won” is the poem’s most accomplished image—three lines that personify the body as a legal adversary defeating a fundamental force of nature. The curves don’t defy gravity (a cliché) or resist gravity (passive); they argue with it, implying a case made, evidence presented, a verdict delivered. Gravity loses. Then the speaker: “And me? / I’m at a loss, / grasping air—.” The pivot from her winning to his losing is structurally perfect. She defeats physics; he can’t hold onto the space she occupied. The title image arrives: “her outline, / faintly shimmering, / framed perfectly / between my outstretched hands.” This is the poet as photographer, making a viewfinder with his fingers, composing a shot of something already gone. The shimmering outline is not the woman but the afterimage—the visual residue left on the retina after the light source moves on. He’s framing absence, and the frame is made of air. “And that— / that little hope, / I bring / home” is the poem’s emotional landing. The “that” repeated is the speaker pointing at the intangible thing he’s holding—not the woman, not even the image, but the hope that the image generated. He brings home not a person but a feeling. The postscript—”External beauty / is always shaped / by the quiet radiance / of inner beauty”—is Plahm’s philosophical correction to his own poem: the 9++ rating was surface; the real argument with gravity was won by something interior. The poem rates the body and then explains that the rating was actually about the soul.

A poem that does more in fifteen lines than many do in fifty. The cinematic structure—approach, reverse angle, aftermath—gives the piece the rhythm of a scene rather than a meditation, and the brevity is the poem’s discipline: it captures one moment and doesn’t linger past its natural duration. “Her curves argued / with gravity / and won” is one of the best three-line images in the catalog—the verb “argued” is the key, converting physical beauty from passive spectacle into active persuasion. The “9++” is a brave inclusion: it risks sounding crude, but it works because the poem immediately complicates the rating, revealing that the number was the poet’s first draft and the poem itself is the revision. The grasping-air image is the poem’s structural hinge, and its physical specificity (outstretched hands, framing the outline) converts an abstract experience (longing for beauty) into a concrete gesture anyone can visualize. “That little hope” is perfectly calibrated—”little” is the essential modifier, preventing the poem from inflating a street-level encounter into a grand romantic narrative. This was a moment, not a love story, and the hope it generated is proportionally small—but real enough to bring home. The postscript risks preachiness (explaining your own poem is usually a mistake), but here it works because it reads as self-correction rather than instruction: the poet rating beauty realizes the rating was measuring the wrong thing, and says so. The entire poem is an argument that seeing is never just seeing—it’s framing, composing, holding, hoping, and eventually understanding that what you saw was shaped by what you couldn’t see.