The sky writes poems in this one, and it has been forgetting to.

Like a poem the sky forgot to write, until you looked up, and I saw you. Read that sequence carefully, because the order is the point. She looks up first. He sees her second. Looking up means looking at the sky, so the gesture that makes her visible is the same gesture that completes the metaphor she is standing inside. The sky’s unwritten poem finishes itself the moment its subject glances at the author.

What follows is the poet’s own machinery switching on. Words tumbled into rhyme. Before her, nothing was being composed. After her, composition starts by itself, without anybody deciding to begin.

The best small moment arrives in the third stanza and is easy to walk past. I hear myself promise. Not I promise. He overhears his own vow as it arrives, which makes it involuntary, produced by the mouth before the man had authorized any of it. A poem written five weeks earlier argued that the body speaks a language the mind cannot govern. The same thing happens here to speech.

The promise is stranger than it first appears. I will love you fully, when my dream world ends. Love postponed, made conditional on the dreaming stopping. Most love poems promise now and promise more. This one promises later, and only once the idealized version has fallen away, which reads as a claim about waking and as a claim about dying, and works either way.

Revolution earns its place too. Falling into my mind’s revolution suggests upheaval, and it also suggests rotation, one turn of a body around a fixed point, which is the older sense and the one the sky imagery supports. He falls into orbit.

The close ranks among the best in recent months. You will still be the last line the sky ever wrote. A last line is where a poem puts its weight, and the sky stops writing after her, so nothing comes afterward. Still does quiet work in there, carrying the claim past the ending of the dream world.

Plahm has asked this question before. “Stars in My Eyes” opened on almost exactly this poem’s title, so how beautiful are you, and answered by reaching for the size of the universe. The answer here is smaller and better. A single well-made sentence, which credits her with craft rather than magnitude, and craft is by far the rarer compliment.

The middle is where it thins. Visions gave shape to vagueness sets two abstractions beside each other and shapes nothing, which is a poor line in a poem about the arrival of clarity. Rewrote my mission manages to be grandiose and unclear simultaneously. Fully, inside the promise, is a filler adverb in a line that needed none. Three soft lines out of sixteen is a high rate, and all three fall in the same stretch, between two very good bookends.

Two excellent bookends with a soft middle between them. The sky as a forgetful poet that finally writes its last line gives the piece a genuine frame, and the opening sequence is cleverer than it looks, since she looks up before he sees her, which means the gesture revealing her is also the gesture completing the metaphor that contains her. I hear myself promise is the best small move, turning a vow into something overheard rather than decided. You will still be the last line the sky ever wrote is among the strongest closings in recent months. What costs the poem is the stretch in between. Visions gave shape to vagueness places two abstractions side by side and shapes nothing, rewrote my mission is grandiose and vague at once, and fully is a filler adverb inside a promise that needed no help. Three weak lines across sixteen is a high proportion, and all of them land in the same place.