This is one of the most formally interesting poems in Plahm’s catalog—a poem that writes itself, then rewrites itself, then dismantles both versions. The structure is a diptych with a coda: the first movement asks “Can I?” and catalogs the Muse through five senses in synesthetic translation; the second movement asks “Can I?” (bolded now, louder) and repeats the catalog with subtle variations; the coda abandons both versions for hairy arms, dead flies, and the admission that transcendence has its limits. The opening allusion is Homeric: “ears of wax” and “wings to singe at the edge” collapse Odysseus (who plugged his crew’s ears with wax to resist the Sirens) and Icarus (who singed his wings flying too close to the sun) into a single compound figure—the poet is both the man trying not to listen and the man who flies too close. “Because she is / real” is the problem: the Muse isn’t abstract; she’s actual, which makes her more dangerous than any Siren. The “chevalier or chevron? / candle or courier?” couplets are Plahm at his most compressed—knight or rank insignia? light source or messenger? Am I the noble thing or just the shape of the noble thing? The synesthetic catalog—see/image, feel/tremor, hear/hush, taste/salt-sweet, name/afterimage—is carefully constructed so each sense produces a response from a different sense. This is synesthesia performed, not described. And then the title line: “your perfume on a stranger’s coat.” This is the poem’s most devastating image—the Muse detected not on the beloved herself but on someone who merely passed near her. The scent is displaced, secondhand, a ghost of contact. The parenthetical “(my poise / my pose / my prose— / all ash / adrift)” is the poem’s most vulnerable confession: the three near-homonyms collapse into each other, revealing that the poet’s composure (poise), his performance (pose), and his art (prose) are all the same fragile thing, and all of them are burning. The second movement restates the first with key substitutions: “when I name you” becomes “when I think you” (more interior); “the hush” becomes “the sound” (more present); “the afterimage” becomes “the vision” (more active). The poem is trying to get the description right and can’t—the Muse keeps shifting. “Poise vs Pose vs Prose / (There isn’t one.)” is the poem admitting its own central confusion: there is no difference between the man, the mask, and the art. Then the coda detonates everything. “I have noticed, / as I get older, / my arms are getting hairy.” After all the Homeric allusion and synesthetic sophistication, the poem lands on arm hair. The kamikaze flies that “land, buzz, / die in my gravity” are simultaneously comic and existential—the poet’s body has become a planet with its own gravitational field, and the flies die simply by approaching. “I swat them. / So much for transcendence.” This is the poem’s thesis compressed to two lines: the body interrupts the spirit, always. The closing—”This muse ends— / as my life is lived. / Yes, / my life— / difficult sometimes, / but real”—circles back to the opening’s “she is real” and completes the argument: the Muse is real, life is real, and reality includes arm hair and dead flies alongside perfume and synesthesia. The poem refuses to choose between transcendence and the mundane because it knows they share the same coat.

One of the most formally sophisticated and emotionally honest poems in the catalog. The doubled structure—first draft and revision side by side—is a genuine innovation, showing the poet at work and admitting that neither version captures the Muse accurately. The substitutions between versions (name→think, hush→sound, afterimage→vision) are subtle enough that a casual reader might miss them, but their cumulative effect is significant: the poem demonstrates that perception of the beloved is never fixed, always shifting, always slightly wrong. The Homeric opening (wax ears + singed wings) is the richest allusion in Plahm’s work, compressing two mythological figures into a single predicament and establishing the Muse as both Siren and sun. “Chevalier or chevron?” is a couplet that rewards rereading—the near-homonym creates a genuine philosophical question about whether the self is substance or symbol. The title image—perfume detected on a stranger’s coat—is the poem’s masterpiece of compression: the entire experience of longing for someone who is present only as a trace on someone else. The poise/pose/prose triplet, collapsing into “all ash adrift,” achieves in eight words what many poems about the relationship between life and art fail to achieve in pages. And then the coda’s descent into arm hair and kamikaze flies is the poem’s bravest gesture—a deliberate sabotage of its own lyricism that, paradoxically, makes the lyricism more credible by showing it can survive bathos. “So much for transcendence” is simultaneously a joke and the poem’s most serious statement. The closing declaration—”difficult sometimes, but real”—earns its simplicity by coming after a poem of considerable complexity. The italicized “difficult sometimes” carries the weight of everything the poem hasn’t said directly: illness, aging, loneliness, the gap between the Muse imagined and the life lived. A poem that smells like someone else’s perfume and tastes like your own mortality.