Mark Maxey's poem catches a single afternoon in a St. Louis café and lets the speaker's mind drift around it. Ordinary details pile up: chai and sushi, a woman joking about a nasty public bathroom, a man on the sidewalk chatting with his father on a cell phone, music drifting out of a bar. The speaker mostly watches, half-present, while ice melts in a water glass.
Between these snapshots, the thoughts turn dreamy. The cobblestones become a kind of image for time, with "century old dreams" and "translucent rainbows" suggesting the past lingering under the present. The speaker also seems to long for someone not yet met, a silence waiting to be filled.
The mood is relaxed, wistful, and a little detached. When a call comes and a man leaves, nothing dramatic happens. The ending, "it just is," accepts the day as it is, with no big feelings or conclusions, and simply moves on down the road.