January Poems #20: The Levee

This poem, along with the updates from the 18th and the 19th come from a folder on my home hard drive called "Fever Poems," which contains all the love peoms I've written over the years--or, rather, the ones I chose to retain, mostly because they had enough merit as poems that knowledge of the women that inspired them wasn't necessary. Because of that, sometimes I forget which woman a given poem was written about. Sometimes, that's not a bad thing.

Prayers spoken after midnight in
low Gregorian tones and quarters
flipped high and hard into Chinese
restaurant fountains can't save you
at the point of saturation, where
her walking past you makes every
molecule in your body scream at
the tops of their tiny lungs except
for those involving your mouth;
where love songs on your radio
make you want to whip it out your
window without opening it first;
where you can be doing something--
tying your shoes, winding your
watch, drawing a blade across
your morning stubble, breathing--
and the taste of her name on your
tongue runs twenty-four frames a
second of your thumb and index
cupping her chin, lips tumbling
hers, pulse touching hers, eyes
opening to find that whatever you'd
been trying to do up to that
moment has been swept downstream
by the current along with any
pretensions, intentions, sleights
of hand, thought or voice to keep
the sandbags propped in place
long enough for a running start.