Read the preface first, because the poem does not work without it.

A three-line thought, dated the third of August. Finished at half past two in the morning on the twenty-seventh. It needed an object. It was you. Dolly.

Now look at how the poem opens. Smiling, happy, delicate. Loving. She is: and then a colon, punctuation that promises something is arriving. For twenty-four days nothing arrived. Three adjectives and a verb, waiting on a noun. Then Dolly Parton died on the twenty-fifth, and two nights later the noun turned up and the sentence closed.

That is the entire architecture and it sits visible on the page. A poem held open by a colon until the world supplied its object.

What follows is not an elegy, though it was finished in the shadow of one. The gift comes from the Muse. She gave me a gift, a simple smile of love in my moment of doubt and weakness, and the outcome is that he can breathe and feels healed. Dolly enters as the figure who makes that legible. Only a Tough Broad would understand my transformation. She lived it.

Then the two women merge, and Plahm declines to smuggle it past anybody. He puts the question inside his own poem. Is Dolly my muse? Why not. I can’t imagine better inspiration. That aside is the hinge, and setting it in italics keeps it honest, marking it as something the poet thought rather than something the poem asserts.

The best line is an instruction to the dead. Dolly, have no mercy, just compassion. Mercy runs downhill, granted by whoever holds the power, while compassion meets a person level. Asking somebody to withhold the first and offer the second draws a real distinction and a demanding one.

The close reaches for country music and arrives. Even Jolene knew, just like the Gambler knew, which way the cards folded, and why a smile is always the winning hand. Two songs invoked by title, one of them Parton’s own and the other belonging to the man she recorded her most famous duet with. Jolene’s power in that song was never anything but her face, so calling it a winning hand fits, and the Gambler supplies the card logic beneath it.

Something completes here that began six weeks earlier. In mid-July a poem promised the Muse she would find her cure and refused to watch her waste away. This one records the reverse transaction: she smiled at him in a bad moment and he was the one restored. Her smile has been accumulating throughout these recent poems, watched for at daybreak, shining from a pillow, named outright as a miracle, grieved as the one a child never got to give. Here it heals somebody, and then it takes the hand.

Where the poem weakens is register. Just kick me in the ass sits four lines from bestows fulfilment, and nothing bridges that gap. The structure wanders as well, addressing Dolly, then the Muse, then nobody in particular, never quite settling. As sweet as can be comes off the shelf. The frame around this poem is better made than the poem standing inside it.

The frame outperforms the poem. A preface recording that three lines waited twenty-four days for their object, finished at half past two in the morning two nights after Dolly Parton died, hands the piece a genuine architecture, and the opening colon left hanging until a noun arrived is the strongest structural move in it. Have no mercy, just compassion draws a real distinction, since mercy gets granted downward while compassion meets a person level. The country music close works, with two songs invoked by title and Jolene’s winning hand paying off the smile the poem has been building toward. What costs it is register. Just kick me in the ass sits four lines from bestows fulfilment, and nothing bridges that. The poem wanders too, turning to Dolly, then the Muse, then no one, without ever settling, and as sweet as can be is a phrase taken off the shelf. Warm, loose, and carried by its preface.