Plahm opens with painterly precision, equating the beloved with daybreak in language that is genuinely sensory rather than decoratively poetic: the “first light of dawn, / casting jewels of red / in the ripples of clouds” sets a cinematic stage, and the progression from eyes to heart to soul traces the path of light itself—entering through the gaze, warming the chest, illuminating the interior. The structural movement from morning to evening is the poem’s architectural backbone: the speaker crowns his Muse “Queen of the Morning” and longs to be her “King of the Evening,” proposing a shared sovereignty over the full cycle of the day. The amethyst sunsets and “welcoming smile of affection” in the evening section deepen the palette from dawn’s golds to dusk’s purples, expanding the emotional register from admiration to desire. But the poem’s most distinctive move is its deliberate derailment. Midway through, Plahm breaks the lyric trance with a self-interrogation—”where did THAT come from?”—and a comedic inventory of inspiration’s mundane origins: the car, the garbage, the cat. This meta-layer is not digression but honesty; it insists that beauty arrives not through ceremony but through Tuesday mornings. The “splendor of shadows” / “shadow of splendors” chiasmus is a compressed philosophy of time—past as shadow, future as splendor, each containing the other. The profane eruption (“Shit, / I’ve been ambushed— / again”) is vintage Plahm, puncturing his own lyricism with a self-aware grin before the closing descent into a rapid-fire catalog of desired encounters—lunch, brunch, breakfast, tea, life—that reads like a man throwing every invitation at the wall. The final pivot to Earl Grey “At noon. / Desperately” is the poem’s comic masterstroke: after pages of cosmic imagery, the desire reduces to a specific tea at a specific hour, and the word “Desperately” lands as both joke and confession. A poem that contains its own making, its own critique, and its own surrender.

A richly layered poem that succeeds by containing two poems in one—a luminous dawn-to-dusk love lyric and a candid, self-interrupting meditation on the act of writing it—and making the collision between them feel intentional rather than chaotic. The opening sunrise sequence is among Plahm’s most controlled imagistic writing: the progression from jeweled clouds to tender eyes to brimming heart to sanctuary soul builds with genuine painterly discipline, and the shift from morning gold to evening amethyst expands the poem’s emotional palette without losing coherence. The Queen/King conceit gives the piece its structural spine, and the conditional “If, / only…” at the poem’s center carries the weight of every unrequited poem in the catalog compressed into two words. The meta-interruption—asking where the poem came from, confessing it was born taking out the garbage—is the piece’s most original move, grounding transcendence in the stubbornly ordinary. The “splendor of shadows” chiasmus is formally elegant and philosophically resonant. The comedic acceleration in the closing third (the lunch/brunch/breakfast cascade, the self-mocking “Influencer” aside, the Earl Grey “Desperately”) demonstrates Plahm’s increasingly confident tonal range—he can move from sacred to profane without whiplash. Where the poem occasionally loses footing is in its length; the middle section’s philosophical asides, while individually interesting, extend the piece past its natural center of gravity, and a few passages (“And the expression of thought becomes extended”) state what the poem is already demonstrating. But the final image—arriving at the end, admitting he writes many like this, then returning once more to the Queen of the Morning—earns its circularity. A poem that rises, reflects, stumbles, laughs at itself, and rises again.