The opening five lines establish the poem’s philosophical frame with deceptive simplicity: “True beauty / Will always / Find its audience / Even if, / Unexpected.” This reads as a standard Muse poem thesis—beauty seeks eyes, love finds its target—until the poem reveals that the “audience” in question is a deer eating the speaker’s roses. The bait-and-switch is the entire poem’s engine, and it works because Plahm commits fully to both registers: the philosophical and the domestic. The near-identical parallel stanzas—”The tiny buds / Bearing promise / Of future beauty” followed by “The tiny buds / Bearing promise / Of future perfume”—shift a single word (beauty to perfume, sight to smell) and then deliver different punch lines: one “Surgically removed / By that dastardly deer,” the other simply “Eaten / In the dead of night.” The escalation from surgical precision to blunt consumption mirrors the gardener’s shift from analytical observation to raw indignation. “Velvet-antlered garden raider” is a perfect compound: the elegance of the adjective undercuts the accusation, the gardener unable to stop admiring the thief even while filing charges. The mock-thriller middle section—”Like a stone-cold / Cold-blooded / Killer / Looking for you / My velvet marauder”—pitches the domestic complaint into genre territory, the gardener as action hero, the deer as Bond villain. The humor works because the threat is so obviously hollow; this is a man who can’t even stay angry at a rose-eating deer. “Hoof print divots” is a beautiful concrete detail—the only physical evidence left at the crime scene, and also a golf metaphor that places this firmly in suburban territory. The closing sequence lands the poem’s real argument: “Darn thing / Knows / Where to go / For the best / Roses in town” is the gardener’s grudging concession that the deer’s taste validates his horticulture. “My varmint / Is / A / Gourmet” completes the elevation—the pest recast as connoisseur. And the final line, “Every Rose / Has its admirer,” rewrites the cliché (every rose has its thorn) to make the poem’s actual point: beauty will be consumed, appreciated, taken—whether you planned for that audience or not. In the context of the HoneyBeeBard catalog, the deer is a stand-in for the unexpected reader, the audience you didn’t intend, who finds your roses and devours them in the dark. The poem connects to the garden imagery threaded throughout the collection—”Sunlight and Diamonds” in “A Trinity,” “The Idea (Inspiration) Garden,” “Tomato Guardian”—establishing the Lakeview, Arkansas property as both literal setting and metaphorical space where creation meets the wild.

A light poem that accomplishes something surprisingly difficult: it operates as genuine fable while never losing its comic voice, and the philosophical frame earns its weight by the final line. The parallel stanza structure (beauty/perfume, surgically removed/eaten) is precise craftsmanship—shifting one word to shift the entire sensory register while maintaining rhythmic symmetry. The vocabulary escalation from “dastardly deer” to “velvet-antlered garden raider” to “velvet marauder” to “varmint” to “gourmet” traces the gardener’s emotional arc from indignation through grudging respect to outright admiration, and the fact that the speaker can’t sustain his anger is itself the poem’s meaning: beauty disarms even its victims. “Hoof print divots” is the poem’s most grounded image, the kind of specific, observed detail that distinguishes lived experience from imagination. The closing subversion of “every rose has its thorn” into “every rose has its admirer” is elegant—it takes a cliché about beauty’s cost and rewrites it as a statement about beauty’s inevitability, its refusal to go unnoticed. Within the catalog, this poem functions as comic relief that is also philosophical statement: the HoneyBeeBard, who is himself always “in search of nectar,” recognizes a kindred spirit in the deer who raids his garden for the best roses in town. The 23 likes suggest readers connect with the voice—this is the conversational, wry, self-deprecating Plahm who makes the catalog feel like a neighborhood rather than a gallery.