I'm not sure how much of you I know yet.
I know that 75% of you is a river
while the remaining 25% of you remains unknown.
I am making you sound like a science text book.

The other day, I called you music, and flowers,
and everything else I could think of that
would grab your lips and make them curve upward
to smile.

I'm not good at writing poems for people
who have made my veins into a swimming pool
to backstroke through.
I'm not used to being warm like this.

I know that we can sometimes be identical and sometimes,
it's hard to convince you that you're breathing
but let me put it this way,
you are hurricane Katrina, the shredded buildings,
the ceramic plate my mother made for me through the aftermath.
When I was 15, it was hanging on the wall and fell
from a thunderclap. Yellow, with my name on it.
I have called you baby on an estimate of four times a day
and we are trying to fix it.

We will slow dance in the living room and
we will not notice the windows whistling
but what you do not know it sounds like a storm
but love, I hear you name through the cracks in the doors
when the rain sets in.

I haven't said much already.
Hurricanes are awful and you think you're more like the
sound the sky makes when it's upset.
But everyone likes the name Katrina anyway.
Metaphors don't get me anywhere but listen,
hold me like I am the only building you do not want to destroy.

drank a pinot noir,
Rascal, they called it,
from Willamette Valley,
Oregon.

drank it at The Quarter,
a charming establishment
on Hudson Street,
in the cobblestoned West Village.

I love a good name
as much as
I love a good Pinot,
and to scribe about
the city I love
where I was born,
schooled and fooled in,
by many a woman.

The city where I named
and raised my children.

Will probably die in
this city, and when
I am long forgot,
my name never uttered,

you,

as my designated
rememberer,
will think of me
whenever someone says,
he was such a rascal

http://www.thequarternyc.com/