Psychology of Infatuation

I woke in the drowned night in blankets,
in love with my former lover;
I slid fishly in the sheets to escape her
but I was overcome by need. I hated
the regression; the percussion of depression
wailed and bumped in my brainspace,
and the bow of that violin was pulled over strings
that were tied to the flood, letting in oceans,
till the little piles of love I had saved for Rosalind
were swept away.

In the end I lay still and awaited the day;
did I pray, did I pray for a respite?
For afterwards came, like a thief,
the faintest, most butterfly ghost of the girl
I’d most recently held. And she knelt by the bed,
and she gathered my lips, and she pressed hers against.
When she left, I reflected, and knew that the act had not come
from the other one—Lydia; her kisses, and even her ghost’s
kisses, feel very different.
So I opened the window and whispered my thanks
in case she was still within range,
and I slipped back in bed, laid my head underwater,
asleep till the next major change.