This is Plahm at his most disarmingly comic—a poem that reads like a conversation overheard in the middle, with no clear beginning and no tidy ending, just a man laughing at himself while still trying to get a kiss. The framing is perfect: “I’ll write this on a napkin / and slip this little thought / under her pillow.” The poem presents itself as a napkin note, not a poem—disposable, intimate, the kind of thing you find crumpled in a robe pocket. The “One of These Days / We’ll be back to normal— / whatever that is” opening establishes the poem’s characteristic shrug: normalcy is acknowledged as a fiction, and the poem won’t pretend otherwise. Then the bawdy joke arrives without warning: “My little swimmers / wouldn’t know the difference between / an egg / or a booby.” The double entendre is cheerfully juvenile, and the word “booby”—simultaneously anatomical and birdy—sets the poem’s tonal register: this is a man who finds himself hilarious. The “How Old Am I?” section is the poem’s most reflective passage, and it’s beautifully observed: youth as “fast cars, / slow mornings, / everything still loading”; a night that “never ended / you / forever.” The line break after “ended” creates a double reading—the night never ended, and it never ended you—suggesting that the immortality of youth was both temporal and physical. “Now I creak when I stretch / and blink twice at the mirror / before admitting— / yeah, that’s me” is the poem’s most honest and most universal moment: the daily negotiation with the face in the glass. “The clock’s been doing laps / around my vanity” is a wonderful image—time as a runner circling the ego, wearing it down by repetition rather than confrontation. The Casablanca allusion—”my Ilsa Lund”—drops in like a romantic bomb: suddenly the napkin-note comedian is casting himself as Bogart, the beloved as Bergman, and the poem as the airport scene. “Last year— / I was only 21. / Hahahaa / Silly me— / I’m seventy-two” is the poem’s structural punchline, and the “Hahahaa” spelled out on the page is Plahm laughing at his own joke in real time, refusing to let the poem be more dignified than the man writing it. The closing return of the swimmers—”those Olympic swimmers / might figure it out”—completes the bawdy frame, and the final word, “Again,” is both a request for another kiss and a statement of the poem’s philosophy: do it all again, keep kissing, keep laughing, keep swimming at seventy-two.

A poem that succeeds by refusing to behave like a poem. The napkin-note framing is a stroke of genius—it gives Plahm permission to be rambling, bawdy, self-interrupting, and structurally loose in ways that a “proper” poem couldn’t tolerate, and the looseness is exactly what makes it feel alive. The tonal range is remarkable for such a short piece: it moves from bawdy joke (swimmers/booby) to genuine nostalgia (fast cars, slow mornings) to existential honesty (creaking, blinking at the mirror) to Hollywood romance (Ilsa Lund) to self-deprecating comedy (seventy-two) to tender request (kiss me, again). Each shift feels natural because the napkin-note form accommodates every register—a note under a pillow can contain multitudes. The “How Old Am I?” section is the poem’s strongest writing: “everything still loading” is a brilliant metaphor for youth’s sense of infinite potential, and “the clock’s been doing laps / around my vanity” is an image that captures aging’s assault on self-image with more wit and compression than most entire poems about growing old. The Casablanca reference works because it’s earned by the poem’s romantic sincerity—calling the beloved “my Ilsa Lund” isn’t pretension; it’s a seventy-two-year-old man who still sees his love story in epic terms. The “Hahahaa” on the page is either the poem’s bravest or most reckless gesture—written laughter rarely works in poetry—but here it succeeds because it captures the specific sound of a man cracking himself up, which is exactly what this poem is. The closing “Again” is the perfect final word: one syllable that means kiss me again, love me again, let me be young again, let me write another napkin note again. A poem that proves seventy-two is the new twenty-one, at least on a napkin.