Four words carry this poem: a miracle is not supernatural.

The rest is arrangement around that claim. Plahm strips the category to its ordinary contents and finds a smile at daybreak waiting there, and having made the substitution he treats it in earnest. His miracle behaves the way miracles are supposed to. It arrives unannounced. No explanation is offered. It calls, and may call only once. The grammar of the sacred survives untouched while its contents have been swapped for something that happens in a kitchen at six in the morning.

That operation has been running all month. “Close and Now,” six days earlier, declined a heaven located overhead and built one at ground level among marigolds. “The Body’s Dialect,” two days after that, revised Genesis so Adam’s ache preceded Eve rather than following her. A miracle now turns out to be a face across a breakfast table. Three poems inside a week, each taking a religious category and setting it down on the floor. “Faith is a Self-Portrait” had gone up nine days before the first of them, arguing that belief gets assembled rather than inherited, and this run reads as that argument being put to work.

The ring is what he offers in return, and the phrase holding it is the best writing after the thesis. “A hoop holding hope.” A hoop encloses nothing, which is precisely what makes it a hoop, so the hope is being kept in a shape instead of a container. Modest is the adjective chosen, in a poem that has just refused the supernatural, and those two decisions agree with one another.

Gold does quiet double duty. The smile is golden, the ring is gold, and the miracle and the response to it are made from a single metal. Plahm seldom underlines that kind of connection. He does not underline this one.

Mortality sits in the title rather than the body. While I Have Time. Nothing across the twenty-two lines is morbid, yet the vow comes bounded, and the bound gets stated before the reader has reached the first line. “In all the time I have left” is the sole moment inside the poem where the pressure surfaces, and by then it has long since been established.

Softness costs the piece. Golden and honest occupy separate lines, and honest especially is asked to carry weight it has not earned. In a simple life is filler. Every moment to prove it true drifts loose of any clear antecedent, and the syntax goes briefly out of focus. Your loving smile closes on an adjective describing nothing, in the one position where a poem can least afford a vague word.

A quiet piece, then, assembled around a single line that needs no help at all.

One line does nearly all the work here, and it is strong enough to justify the poem built around it. A miracle is not supernatural performs a genuine substitution, preserving the grammar of the sacred while replacing its contents with a face at breakfast, and the poem shows discipline in letting that claim stand unargued. A hoop holding hope ranks second, and the quiet rhyme between a golden smile and a gold ring is managed without comment. Holding the score down is the proportion of soft language across a short poem. Honest and golden sit alone on their lines doing vague work, in a simple life is filler, every moment to prove it true floats free of any antecedent, and the closing phrase leans on loving, which adds nothing to a smile. Four weak spots inside twenty-two lines is a high rate for a piece this compact.