A nocturne is a night piece, and this one opens before dawn.

That contradiction is the poem itself. Track the hours as they arrive: first thought before dawn, then say goodnight, then tomorrow’s sunlit day, then a promise about what he will write, then good morning, and last of all a hand reaching for the lamp. The cycle runs through twice and out of sequence, finishing on the gesture that ought to have started it. Anyone who has fallen asleep beside someone will recognize the disorder as accurate. During the last minutes before sleep, tomorrow morning is not a separate day. It has already begun.

The poem states this outright. “Tomorrow is forever” arrives second from the end, and then the light goes out on the word. Plahm has arranged things so the closing image is the smallest available action, a switch, set directly after his largest claim.

Names do quiet work here. She is “my Muse, my sweet Dutchie” within one line, the first title literary and public, the second private and domestic, and that pairing conveys more about the marriage than the pastoral stanza following it. This vocabulary has been accumulating for some time. She was “my Lady” two days earlier in “Close and Now,” where the register turned courtly because the subject was death. Bedtime is the subject here, and the name adjusts to fit.

Those two poems sit close in more than date. One puts his resting place in a garden at dusk. This one puts his home inside her heart. Written forty-eight hours apart, both answer the same question about where a person belongs.

Then comes the aside. “Tomorrow, I’ll write about soup and being consommé’d, and other matters of our combined hearts.” A long prose sentence dropped into a poem of short lines, and it lands because it sounds like something said aloud in the dark. He kept the promise, though not on schedule, since “The Rabbit Hole” arrived ten days later. Consommé is broth clarified by drawing the impurities out of it, so being consommé’d means being reduced to what is clear, and the coinage carries more weight than the joke it first appears to be.

Where the poem softens is the middle. Velvet grass, sparkling dew, a path walked toward the future: stock pastoral, and a beacon guiding a soul has been guiding souls a very long time. The strong material sits at the edges of this poem. Its center is mostly holding them apart.

The structure is the achievement. A poem titled nocturne that opens before dawn, says goodnight in its second stanza, and says good morning near the end has scrambled its own clock deliberately, and the disorder matches how the final waking minutes actually feel. Tomorrow is forever, followed immediately by a hand on the light switch, is the best closing so far in this group, because the largest claim and the smallest gesture land in consecutive lines. The soup aside is a risk that pays off, since a long prose sentence inside a poem of short lines reads as speech rather than composition. Holding the score down is a middle stanza assembled almost entirely from stock: velvet grass, sparkling dew, a beacon guiding a soul. This poem’s edges are considerably better than its center.