This is Plahm at his most distilled. In fewer than twenty lines, the poem accomplishes what many of his longer works build toward across stanzas: the precise documentation of love’s inception and its cosmic implications. The opening declaration—”Oh, how I’ve changed / since meeting / You”—is deceptively simple, its three-line staircase descent enacting the very tilt it describes. The poem then catalogs the beloved through a careful matching system: smile matches openness, eyes match honesty, each feature confirming the next like a chain of evidence building toward verdict. The word “tilted” is the poem’s secret engine—not fallen, not broken, but tilted, suggesting a permanent reorientation of the speaker’s inner compass. The conditional middle section (“If you be / who I see…”) introduces a rare note of uncertainty into Plahm’s love poetry, acknowledging that perception and reality may not perfectly align. But the closing stanza resolves this doubt with breathtaking audacity: Heaven itself must wait in line. The speaker claims temporal priority over eternity—”I wish to hold you / in my arms / as long as I can”—and that final qualifier, “as long as I can,” carries the weight of mortality without ever naming it. A miniature that contains a cathedral.

A masterclass in compression. Where many of Plahm’s poems achieve their power through accumulation—layer upon layer of imagery, repetition, and invented language—this one works by subtraction. Every word earns its place; nothing decorates. The three-line opening stanza uses line breaks as emotional notation, each pause deepening the admission. The “matching” conceit (smile matches openness, eyes match honesty) is elegant in its simplicity, building a case for love as coherence rather than chaos. The poem’s structural pivot—the conditional “If you be / who I see”—is its most sophisticated moment, smuggling philosophical doubt into what could otherwise be pure adoration. And the closing gambit, in which the speaker asks Heaven to wait its turn, manages to be simultaneously romantic, defiant, and quietly heartbreaking. The subtitle “Morning Sunrise” grounds the metaphysical in the daily, suggesting this love is not an exception to ordinary life but its illumination. If there is a weakness, it’s that the poem’s brevity may cause readers to underestimate its depth—but that is the reader’s loss, not the poem’s. Among Plahm’s finest short works.