Plahm opens with an offer disguised as a question: “Stability, / flexibility, / and mystery— / if that’s what you need / and something / I can provide / I’m all in.” The three-word catalog (stability, flexibility, mystery) is a personal résumé presented as a poker hand—these are his cards, and he’s pushing them to the center of the table. The “I’m all in” is both a gambling term and a declaration of total commitment, and the poem never retreats from it. The poem’s middle section riffs on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”—”How much do I love you, / Let me count the ways”—then immediately subverts the Victorian formula: “should I start at ten / and count backwards / or begin at one / and climb— / forever.” The countdown versus climb-up is a genuine question about the direction of love: does it narrow toward intensity or expand toward infinity? The poem chooses infinity. The astrophysics conceit arrives with the black hole: “Does a black hole / devour galaxies? / Are you my black hole?” This is a risky metaphor—black holes are associated with destruction—but Plahm steers it with the crucial correction: “I’m totally devoured— / to you / not by you.” The preposition makes the difference: consumed in the direction of the beloved, not consumed by the beloved. Devotion, not annihilation. The witchcraft passage—”Is my enchantment / witchcraft? / I am so bewitched by you— / this should qualify / as magic”—is lighter, more playful, a momentary rest between the cosmic imagery. “Your tidal force / keeps pulling me in” returns to astrophysics, and the “Ahh— / peaceful” that follows is the poem’s most surprising turn: being pulled into a gravitational field is not terrifying but restful. The “smoke and mirrors, / illusions of feelings / blooming / in my mind’s eye” is the poem’s most self-aware passage—the speaker acknowledges that what he’s experiencing might be projection, illusion, his own imagination making something from nothing. But the word “blooming” converts the illusion into growth: even if it’s smoke, it flowers. The closing—”your shimmering silhouette / held lightly / between my hands. / My singularity / of thought”—lands the astrophysics metaphor with precision. In physics, a singularity is a point of infinite density; in the poem, the singularity is a single thought: her. Everything collapses into one point, and that point is the Muse.

A poem that handles the astrophysics-as-love metaphor with more nuance than the conceit usually receives. The black hole is one of poetry’s most tempting and most dangerous images—it tends toward melodrama (I’m being destroyed by love!) or cliché (love is infinite!)—but Plahm navigates it by insisting on the crucial preposition: devoured to the beloved, not by the beloved. That single word converts the metaphor from destruction to direction, from annihilation to devotion, and it’s the poem’s smartest move. The opening offer (stability, flexibility, mystery) is a strong entry point, grounding the cosmic language that follows in something personal and specific: this is a man listing what he brings to a relationship, not a physicist lecturing. The Browning riff is charming—”should I start at ten / and count backwards / or begin at one / and climb— / forever”—and the em-dash before “forever” gives the word its proper weight: it’s not a casual adjective but a destination that keeps receding. The tidal-force-into-peacefulness turn is the poem’s most emotionally surprising moment: gravitational capture reimagined as rest rather than violence. The “smoke and mirrors” self-interrogation adds necessary complexity—the speaker isn’t just swooning; he’s wondering whether the swooning is real or projected, and the answer (“blooming / in my mind’s eye”) accepts that it doesn’t matter: real or imagined, the feeling grows. “Shimmering silhouette / held lightly / between my hands” is a beautiful image that balances the cosmic with the intimate—a silhouette is intangible (you can’t hold one), which means the holding is itself an act of faith. “My singularity / of thought” is the perfect closing: three words that compress the entire astrophysics metaphor into a single obsession. Everything—black holes, tidal forces, galaxies—resolves into one thought, one person, one point of infinite density called love.