This poem is Plahm’s most directly autobiographical piece outside the Alpha-Gal poems—a Thanksgiving reflection that lays out the two educations of his life and shows how the first prepared him for the second. The 1986 mantra is presented as a concrete artifact, escalating line by line: “GET THE JOB. / GET THE JOB DONE. / GET THE JOB DONE RIGHT. / GET THE JOB DONE RIGHT ONTIME. / GET THE JOB DONE RIGHT ONTIME ONCE. / GET THE JOB DONE RIGHT ONTIME ONCE— / AND MAKE A PROFIT.” The stacking structure is visually powerful—each line adds a word, and the accumulation mirrors the pressure of consulting work, where each completed requirement reveals the next. The poet immediately undercuts his own ambition: “Kind of an ambitious, geeky mantra.” Self-deprecation is the poem’s engine, and it runs cleanly throughout. The client story is told with brisk, painful specificity: a self-declared impossible delivery date, a lesson in humility, a paint job that was “a mess of streaked tears.” The business lesson distills to two lines of devastating simplicity: “Honesty & Integrity means: / Do what you say. / Say what you do.” Then the poem pivots—and the pivot is the poem’s structural climax. “I learned fast. / Faster still when / I fell in love / with the most beautiful woman / in the world— / boy, / did I learn fast.” The repetition of “fast” accelerates the poem the way love accelerated the learning. The insight that follows is the poem’s philosophical core: “Nothing sharpens a man / like figuring out what it takes / to keep his promises, / and absolutely refusing / to disappoint / the one he loves.” This is the boardroom-to-bedroom transfer—deadlines taught urgency; love taught eternity. The poem’s most vulnerable passage arrives when the speaker addresses the beloved directly: “You see through every layer, / terrifying and beautiful, / simultaneously, / my heart disclosed.” Being known completely is framed as both terror and beauty, which is more honest than most love poems manage. The lowercase “i love you” near the close is a deliberate typographic choice—the smallest possible statement, unheroic, unadorned, the “truest line / I’ve ever written.” The aurora borealis image (the moment she first smiled at him) is the poem’s governing metaphor for revelation: northern lights appearing in ordinary daylight, still visible today. The closing—”I only want to live / what I’ve learned— / and keep what burns / today”—converts the mantra from business advice into a life philosophy: the job now is love, the deadline is every day, the profit is her presence.

A poem that turns autobiography into architecture. The structural conceit—business mantra as origin story for a love poem—is one of Plahm’s most original framings, and it works because the parallel between professional discipline and romantic commitment is drawn with specificity rather than abstraction. The 1986 mantra is a genuine artifact, and its escalating format gives the poem a visual and rhythmic foundation: each line stacks on the last like bricks, and the final “AND MAKE A PROFIT” lands with the weight of a full wall. The client story is told with just enough detail (the streaked paint job, the sharp humility) to feel real without belaboring. The pivot from business to love is the poem’s best structural move: “I learned fast. / Faster still when / I fell in love” uses the repetition of “fast” to physically accelerate the poem into its second half. “Nothing sharpens a man / like figuring out what it takes / to keep his promises” is the poem’s most quotable line and its deepest insight—the verb “sharpens” converts the man from blunt instrument to precision tool, shaped by the demands of devotion. The “terrifying and beautiful” passage about being fully seen is the poem’s most emotionally exposed moment, and it earns its vulnerability by arriving after the confidence of the business-mantra section—the capable consultant undone by a woman’s gaze. The lowercase “i love you” is a typographic risk that pays off: after all the capitalized mantras and business declarations, the smallest possible statement becomes the loudest. The aurora borealis image—her smile as northern lights that still shine today—is both grand and specific enough to work. The Thanksgiving framing gives the poem its occasion without constraining it, and the closing desire to “keep what burns / today” converts the business mantra’s urgency into something permanent. Where the poem could tighten is in the middle passages, which occasionally restate the honesty/integrity theme more than necessary, but the emotional trajectory from boardroom to bedroom to soul is sustained and convincing. A poem that proves the best business plan is love.