Plahm deploys his sharpest comic voice here, constructing happiness not from transcendence but from the cheerfully absurd specifics of daily life. The poem opens with a feint toward the cosmic (“Is life just a glow, / Only stars in my night’s sky?”) then immediately deflates with the moon showing “the big smile, not the rear-end moon.” From there, each stanza presents a domestic scene reframed through optimism pushed to comic extremes: the dog “Peeing and pooping on cue,” the cat who “doesn’t complain when you loft her into the closet,” tomato plants standing “ramrod straight— / Like, well, you know whose thingy should.” The deer who devour the garden become free lawn aerators—”You pay a fortune for that.” Each observation is both genuinely funny and quietly philosophical: happiness is less about circumstances changing than about choosing to see what’s already good. The bawdy aside about the tomato plants and the self-deprecating “What the heck am I doing? / Spoiling myself?” keep the poem grounded in Plahm’s characteristic irreverence. The closing lines achieve real wisdom through understatement: “Maybe / I’m happy enough / To cherish what if / And what I know.” The word “enough” does enormous work—it’s not ecstasy but sufficiency, and the poem argues that sufficiency, honestly embraced, might be the deepest contentment of all.

One of Plahm’s funniest and most disarmingly wise poems. The comic observations are specific enough to feel lived-in rather than invented—the dog crunching cheap cookies, the cat shredding the couch, the deer choosing stinkshrooms over roses—and each carries a philosophical payload beneath its humor. The structure mirrors the wandering contentment it describes, drifting from sky to pets to garden to deer before arriving at its destination almost by accident. This casual architecture is itself the argument: happiness isn’t reached through deliberate pursuit but stumbled upon while paying attention to what’s already here. The bawdy tomato joke and the “rear-end moon” quip demonstrate Plahm’s range—he can pivot from earthy humor to genuine insight without tonal whiplash. The closing quatrain is perfectly calibrated: “happy enough” refuses the tyranny of perpetual optimization, while “cherish what if / And what I know” holds possibility and gratitude in elegant tension. Minor weakness: the middle stanzas could be tightened slightly—the deer section, while charming, extends the catalog past its optimal length. But the warmth and wit are irresistible, and the poem’s central message—that contentment is a choice made amid imperfection—lands with quiet authority.