Two abstract nouns open the poem and both sound like an accusation. Avoidance. Obfuscation. Latinate, clinical, the vocabulary of a complaint being filed. Then the third line lands and the temperature changes entirely: “a shy, private curtain.” Not a wall. A curtain is something a person hung on purpose, and something that can be drawn back, and shy is a word reserved for people we are fond of. Three lines take the register from diagnosis down to tenderness, which is the whole poem happening in advance.

The question follows. After seven years, how much do I know of you? Plahm answers in a unit of measure. A teaspoon.

What he then does with that measure is why the poem works. A teaspoon is nearly nothing, and the expected next move would be to mourn how little it is. “Fortunately” arrives instead. One word, alone on its line, reversing the entire argument. Seven years of teaspoons come to a cup of sugar, and because it is dispensed a teaspoon at a time, it will last forever. The withholding is not a hardship being borne. It is the mechanism that keeps the sweetness from being spent.

That position on long intimacy is unusually grown-up, and it runs against what most love poems claim to want. Complete knowledge of another person would be an ending. Plahm has figured out that the curtain does him a favor.

His measure is well chosen for a second reason. A cup of sugar is what you knock on a neighbor’s door to borrow, the small domestic transaction that crosses a boundary without dissolving it. Which describes the arrangement exactly.

Seven surfaces yet again, and it has stopped being coincidence. “Seven” went up on the first of June for the anniversary. “Magic is Seven” followed on the third of July. Five days before this poem, “Optimism is Viral” dated the meeting to seven years ago. Subterfuge states that seven is a magic number, very nearly the earlier title reversed. Doubt is what sets this entry apart. The others affirm. This one asks how well he actually knows her and answers honestly, and any sequence about a marriage is stronger for containing one poem that wonders.

The ending is the weak point. “It will last forever” holds the right idea in ordinary words, which shows badly beside a poem that has just spent “Fortunately” so well. The arithmetic runs loose as well. Teaspoons and cups are both real measures, seven of one makes nothing like the other, and a reader doing the math stumbles for a moment before concluding that the poem meant it associatively.

Compact, and smarter than its length lets on. The pivot on Fortunately is the achievement: one word, alone on its line, converting a complaint about being held at a distance into an argument for keeping the distance. Few poems about long marriage arrive at that position, and fewer arrive in eighteen lines. The opening move works too, dropping from the clinical register of avoidance and obfuscation into a shy, private curtain within three lines. Two things hold it back. A strong idea sits in ordinary words at the close, which stands out against the precision of everything before it. And the measurements refuse to add up, since seven teaspoons make nothing near a cup, so the conceit asks to be taken associatively at the very moment it has invited the reader to count.