Fifteen lines, and eleven of them are zoology.

Plahm opens on a comparative survey of contentment sounds and gets the science right. Snow leopards chuffle, a breathy greeting noise the roaring cats produce in place of a purr. Cheetahs purr on the inhale and the exhale both, which is the technical marker dividing the purring cats from the roaring ones. Bear cubs hum while nursing. Pigs puff. This is an actual catalog of how mammals announce that they are happy, assembled by somebody who went and found out.

Then two lines turn the poem. “Me? I make no sound at all.”

Placement is what makes those lines work. Eight lines have established that every warm-blooded creature owns a noise for this, so human silence registers as a deficiency, and for the space of one line the poem allows it to. Then comes the correction. A human contentment signal does exist, and it is thermal rather than acoustic. A heart rate dropping inside someone’s arms, skin against skin producing heat, the sound converted into a different form of energy altogether.

One repetition deserves attention. Bear cubs make a “rhythmic, buzzing hum” with their mother in line five, and by the final stanza she has become “the quiet rhythmic hum of you.” The identical phrase, deliberately returned. She is the one still making the sound and he is the one being held. Plahm has quietly assigned himself the cub’s position and given her the warmth to hum against, which is a more exposed admission than the poem’s light manner suggests.

The piece also answers something written a week before it. “The Body’s Dialect” argued that the body speaks a language the mouth cannot govern and the mind cannot decode. Here that same body turns out to be most articulate when it produces nothing whatsoever. Two poems, seven days apart, working one problem from opposite ends, and this is the warmer of them.

Faults are small and visible. Piggy appears twice within two lines, and the register of that word sits badly between snow leopards and the closing stanza. Silent friction-heat stacks a modifier onto a hyphenated compound and lands clumsily in a poem otherwise light on its feet. The final line states its paradox instead of performing it, since the quiet rhythmic hum of you had already carried the idea, and the silent sound of love only explains what the preceding line accomplished.

Well built and warm, with an architecture doing most of the work. Eight lines of comparative zoology, a two-line pivot, four lines of resolution, and the pivot lands precisely where it needs to. The research holds up, since chuffling snow leopards and cheetahs purring on both breath phases are real and specific rather than invented, which lends the catalog a weight decorative animal imagery never carries. Substituting heat for sound as the human contentment signal is a genuine idea, and it arrives without any fuss around it. Two things hold the score here. Piggy in consecutive lines drops the register below everything surrounding it, and the closing line explains a paradox the line before had already delivered. Small blemishes on a nicely made small poem.