Consommé is stock made clear by adding something to it. Egg white goes into the pot, coagulates as the liquid heats, rises into a raft at the surface, and captures every particle that was clouding the broth. The impurities get caught by an ingredient introduced on purpose rather than strained away. Understand that process and this poem explains itself, because Plahm has built the thing to work the way the recipe works.

Two versions appear, and both are necessary. The first is labeled the original idea and reads like exactly that: a man scribbling at night. Punctuation gives out. Soup thing. Cook it. A soup of silly, a stew of stupid. This is the cloudy stock, and printing it serves a structural purpose. Without it the poem has nothing to clarify.

A short bridge sits between them, admitting to eight drafts. Six stay invisible. The gap is honest, and it is also the least interesting writing here, since endless thoughts of clouds and visions of beauty are connective material almost any poem could supply.

Then the finished version, where the pleasure lives in comparison. Watch what happens to individual words. Consume becomes consummation, dragging a marriage term into a poem about soup and aiming it at the Muse. A cup of noodles with egg becomes a cup of noodles and a stringy egg, and stringy is precisely what egg does when it meets hot liquid without setting into a proper raft, making it the technical description of a botched clarification. Best of all, my nocturne thoughts become simple corrects itself to my nocturnal thoughts clutter. The draft claimed things were getting clearer. The revision admits otherwise. Most poets edit toward flattering themselves; this one edited toward accuracy.

Unsoup is the coinage carrying the argument, and it turns up twice: once as a consummation of unsoup thick as cold gravy, once as the night’s unsoup being clarified. Cold gravy is opaque and congealed, everything a consommé refuses to be, so the failed poem and the achieved poem end up with names describing their textures.

The ending handles the technique properly. The egg’s clarification is key, that final stir opens the morning to the muse. A stir is the last thing a cook does before leaving the raft alone to work, and Plahm has positioned the Muse on the far side of that operation. Night produces the mess. The egg catches it. Morning arrives clear, and she is there.

Ten days earlier, “Nocturne Muse” promised a poem about soup and being consommé’d. That promise came from a poem whose title supplied the word nocturne, which survives here in the draft and gets revised out of the finished text. A small trace, and the sort of thing only a reader holding both poems at once would notice.

One further note on the eternal chicken soup he mentions making. It has appeared in the collection before, in “The Sunday After,” and here he calls it a quiet remedy. The recent poems have spent considerable time on illness and on the time a person has left. Soup as medicine is doing more than seasoning the metaphor.

The most ambitious construction in the recent work, and the ambition is earned through technical accuracy. Consommé is stock clarified by an egg raft that traps whatever is clouding it, and Plahm has assembled a poem operating on that exact principle, printing the cloudy draft beside the clear version so a reader can watch the clarification take place. Form and subject are the same thing here, which is difficult and rare. The word-level revisions repay close attention, especially consume shifting into consummation, and nocturne thoughts become simple correcting itself to nocturnal thoughts clutter, a revision toward truth instead of toward self-flattery. Stringy egg is the technical description of a failed raft, so even the throwaway detail keeps doing culinary work. What costs the poem is its bridge, where endless thoughts of clouds and visions of beauty supply the kind of connective tissue any draft produces. It also asks something unusual of a reader, who has to hold two texts in mind at once to see the point. Worth the demand it makes.