Six lines, six one-word openers, and a whole encounter unfolds between the first waft of mystery and the last handful of sand. RKM's poem carries the invitation «Call it what you want» as its title, and what it describes is someone seen, desired and almost touched, though never named. There is no "she", no name, no face. The figure is assembled from a scent in the air, the sound of heels, a curve, a corset, some silk. That absence is the poem's key. The speaker's attention is so fixed on surface and silhouette that the person vanishes behind the effect she has.
The title shrugs: love, lust, obsession, admiration, pick your word. Yet the shrug sounds slightly defensive, as if the speaker suspects that any label would be unflattering. The poem leaves the judgement to the reader, and its details pull in more than one direction.
The construction is the best evidence for that. Every line begins with a single word and a comma, like a headline, followed by a cluster of images. The headlines run Enigma, Sultry, Curve, Thaw, Touch, Grab. The first three describe, and the last three act. The grammar moves from noun and adjective towards the imperative verb, from looking to reaching. The senses climb the same ladder: smell ("waft of mystery in the air"), hearing ("walking click clock"), sight ("hourglass", "silhouette"), then a near-taste richness ("caramel", "dripping"), and finally touch.
"Click clock" is a small piece of sound design. The vowel shift from *i* to *o* imitates a pendulum, and it plants the idea of time, which the next line picks up with "sinched hourglass". That phrase describes a waist and a timer at once. The poem's last image, "golden sand", completes the hourglass. The speaker grabs, and what he reaches for runs through the fingers. The poem ends where its imagery began, with the sense that the moment is already draining away.
The sound patterns tighten and then fail. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but the lines form loose pairs. "Air" and "stares" share a vowel, and "silhouette" and "corset" chime on their endings. In the last pair, "pure" and "sand" do not answer each other at all. The rhyme gives out just as the speaker is said to come "unhinged". The syntax does the same. Most lines are fragments with no main verb, and in the final line the grammar wobbles: "floaters" is plural, "unhinges" is singular, and it is unclear what is doing the unhinging. Judging by the imagery, "floaters" may also recall the specks that drift across the eyes after staring too long or standing up too fast. Either way, the speaker's perception is coming loose.
The most telling moment is in the fifth line. Up to then the poem is a catalogue of looking, with its hard *c* and *k* sounds in "click clock" and "caramel French corset" and its hissing *s* in "Sultry", "sinched", "soot silhouette" and "silk". Then a voice breaks in: "Oh no, pollute, Lily pure." The lily is a traditional emblem of purity, and the speaker briefly imagines that touching would stain it. The earlier "soot silhouette" and "dark dripping" set darkness against that whiteness. The conscience lasts only the length of an exclamation. The next line is simply "Grab".
What makes the poem worth reading is that it stages desire and guilt side by side without settling which wins. In fewer than fifty words it shows a gaze that turns a person into parts, and it seems half aware of doing so. A reader can take the poem as an honest portrait of attraction, or as a quiet exposure of how attraction objectifies. The title hands that decision to us. The structure suggests the speaker has already lost control of his own sentence, let alone the woman he describes.