Rain falls on a drum, and the drum is the earth.

That is the governing image, and Plahm gets the vocabulary right. A mallet is a percussion striker, the soft-headed kind used on timpani and marimba, and choosing that word makes rain a specific instrument rather than general weather noise. The earth becomes the drumhead. Nobody is playing.

An instrument no hands have ever held is the phrase that sets the poem going. Music without a musician, sound with no author standing behind it, which is what weather is and what almost nothing else in a person’s day can claim.

Folds does quiet work in the second movement. Rain folds the day’s noise, and folding is what a cook does to incorporate one thing into another without beating it flat. The noise gets absorbed rather than cancelled, until the mind slows to one clear pulse, a word belonging to music and to the circulatory system, both applying at once.

The paradox is the best stanza. Wind that owns nothing carries a voice belonging to everything, and that voice speaks only for us. Rain falls across a whole county at once and reaches one person as a private message. Anyone who has stood at a window during a storm while thinking of somebody knows the arrangement to be exactly this, universal and addressed.

A second reading is available on that stanza, given where this poem is going. A sentiment that belongs to everyone and speaks only for two people is the definition of a greeting card, and Plahm has found the image for how such a thing manages to work at all. Mass-produced and private in the same breath.

Which accounts for the one absence worth noticing. He keeps a whole wardrobe of names for the woman these poems address, Muse and Lady and sweeter things besides, and here she carries none of them. She is you. That vagueness is deliberate. A card has to leave room for the buyer’s own person to occupy the space, so the beloved is left unfurnished on purpose.

Thirteen days earlier, a different poem had sound arriving as violence, a guitar riff landing like a left to the jaw and leaving a bruise in the marrow. This one reverses the polarity completely. Identical subject, a sound getting inside a body, and the opposite outcome: the world thins to silence instead of ringing.

What the poem lacks is friction. Nothing resists, nothing complicates, and the closing Only you is the most predictable ending available. Both facts follow from what the piece was built to accomplish rather than from any failure of craft, and they mark the ceiling on something that is otherwise faultless inside its own limits.

Clean, economical, and correct about percussion. A mallet is the soft-headed striker used on timpani and marimba, so calling rain a mallet makes it a specific instrument rather than general weather noise, with the earth serving as the drumhead beneath. An instrument no hands have ever held is the phrase that launches the poem, and folds the day’s noise is precise, since folding incorporates where beating would flatten. The paradox stanza is the best of it: a voice belonging to everything that speaks only for two people, true of rain and equally true of anything sent from one person to another. What the poem lacks is resistance. Nothing complicates, no line surprises, and Only you is the most expected ending on offer. Those limits follow from what this was made to do rather than from any failure of craft, and within them it does not put a foot wrong.