This is one of the most stripped-down poems in Plahm’s catalog—no metaphorical fireworks, no comic diversions, no Muse invoked by name. It is a poem about the moment between sleep and waking, and it performs that liminal state through its own skeletal structure. The couplet form (two lines per stanza, no punctuation until the final period) creates a halting, fragmented rhythm that mimics the paralysis the poem describes. “I’ve been writing / In my dreamscape”—the past progressive tense places the writing in an ongoing dream, a composition happening without the conscious poet’s participation. The dreamscape wrote; the waking man can only report that it happened. “I woke with trepidation / Unable to move” introduces the poem’s physical reality: sleep paralysis or its emotional equivalent, the terror of waking into a body that won’t cooperate. The vision is “still with me / But the words frozen”—the image survives the crossing from sleep to waking, but language does not. This is every writer’s nightmare rendered literally: having the poem and being unable to write it down. “I rise to the still / Of night” is the poem’s most evocative image—”the still of night” is a cliché, but “I rise to the still” makes “still” a noun, a substance, something the poet physically enters. “I stood at / The precipice / Saw the judgement / Laid out”—this could be the dream’s content (a vision of judgment) or the waking moment’s self-assessment (the judgment of having lost the dream’s words). The ambiguity is the poem’s engine: we never learn what the dream contained. “My neck is tight / My fingers are bent”—the body as obstacle, the instrument that won’t play. The fingers that should write are curled, locked, arthritic or paralyzed. “Where should / I start / The beginning / Or the ending”—the writer’s fundamental question, now unanswerable because the material is dissolving. And the closing: “The truth / Escapes me / As I come / Awake.” The paradox is precise: waking, which should bring clarity, is what destroys the truth. Consciousness is the enemy of vision. The poem titled “Transcendence” is about the failure to transcend—the dream offered transcendence, and waking took it away.

A poem that earns its brevity by refusing to fill in what the dream contained—the absence is the point. At twelve couplets, this is among the shortest pieces in the catalog, and its spareness is structurally appropriate: a poem about frozen words should itself be terse, halting, incomplete. The couplet form creates a breathing pattern that mimics the gasping uncertainty of waking from a vivid dream, and the lack of punctuation throughout (until the final period) keeps every line break suspended, unresolved, mid-thought—which is exactly how the waking mind processes a dissolving vision. “The vision still with me / But the words frozen” is the poem’s thesis in two lines, and it articulates something every writer recognizes: the moment when meaning is present but language is absent, when you know what you dreamed but can’t say it. “My neck is tight / My fingers are bent” grounds the experience in the body with physical specificity that prevents the poem from floating into abstraction. The precipice image connects to the recurring precipice motif in Plahm’s work (“The Devil’s Breath,” “Vignettes of Synesthesia”), but here the precipice is between sleep and waking rather than between life and death—a smaller but no less real threshold. The closing paradox—truth escaping precisely at the moment of awakening—is the poem’s sharpest philosophical observation, suggesting that consciousness is not the gateway to truth but its gatekeeper. Where the poem could push further is in its middle stanzas, which maintain the halting rhythm but don’t deepen the imagery beyond the initial premise. A longer development of the dream’s content—even fragmentary—might have given the reader more to hold. But the poem may be arguing that there is nothing to hold: the dream is gone, and this skeletal record is all that survived the crossing. A poem about loss that enacts the loss it describes.