The most intimate thing that passes between the two people in this café is a Wi-Fi password. That is the joke at the heart of Agent Aslan's "Flowing Glances at Cafe Trieste'," and also its tenderness. The speaker has exchanged almost no words with a stranger, yet he announces, "I fell in love today all over again." The phrase "all over again" gives him away early. By the last stanza he admits that such loves "come and go on a daily basis." The poem is about infatuation as a habit: sincere in the moment, faintly absurd in hindsight, and managed by a speaker who knows his own pattern and half-laughs at it.
The form is plain and tidy. There are four quatrains, and the rhyme shifts between two patterns. The first and third stanzas rhyme only their second and fourth lines ("Trieste'" with "rest," "best" with "rest"). The second and fourth rhyme crosswise ("regretting" with "sitting," "connection" with "convection," "head" with "instead"). The rhythm is loose and talky, with long lines that stretch past a regular beat and then snap short, as in "my pulse has yet to slow and rest." The dropped letters in "flowin'" and the stray apostrophe in "Trieste'" make the voice sound spoken rather than composed. Some lines stumble, such as "I'm convinced of in now that." Whether that is a slip or not, the awkwardness suits a speaker still flustered by what he has seen.
The best moment in the poem is the rhyme of "connection" with "convection." The first is the wireless link that starts the encounter. The second is a physics word for heat moving through a liquid, and it suits a café where everything is steaming. By calling their unspoken feelings "multidimensional convection," the speaker dresses a crush in scientific language. It is a comic overreach, but it also shows a mind trying to turn a trivial moment into something grander. The word "regretting" in "the only words we exchanged were regretting" is ambiguous. I read it as the speaker regretting how little was said, though the syntax does not make this certain.
Colour carries the imagery. The woman has "thick red eye lashes and a matching mane flowin'," and the verb echoes the title's "flowing glances," so her hair and the looks between them seem to move in the same current. The final stanza answers that image with another red: "give me a bottle of red wine instead." The speaker swaps the woman for the drink, and the colour makes the swap neat. Other details work through everyday café language. "Hold the coffee" borrows a barista's phrase and uses it to refuse the whole ritual of longing. "Glancing races" fuses eyes darting and a pulse speeding, picking up the earlier "my pulse has yet to slow." It is also telling that the desire lives in a "yearning body and head." The heart, the usual organ of love poetry, is left out.
The third stanza holds the poem's oddest logic. "I know I'll never see her again, / it's really for everyone's best." Then comes the reasoning: "If she were the last love of my life, / what would happen with all the rest?" The question is half serious. If this one mattered most, all the others would lose their meaning. The speaker prefers a world where love is plentiful and nothing is risked, so he never speaks to her and calls it kindness. The phrase "on a daily basis" sounds like office paperwork and deflates the romance. That fits a man who tidies up his feelings before they can cost him anything.
The poem is significant for how much it makes of so little. Love at first sight is an old subject, but here it happens over a laptop, with a password as the only line of dialogue. The poem is funny without being cruel to its speaker. It lets him be ridiculous and lonely at once, and the final glass of wine reads as both a joke and a small consolation. The strongest feeling in it may be the quiet recognition that wanting someone and doing nothing about it can become a way of life.