Comfort Zone

[StanleyZ]

Her smile sagged
the same way a crooked
painting forces you to notice it.
 
I watched her relax while I ate egg salad
and mulled over the days business;
a leaf landed in her hair as she napped
on the bench beneath a nearby oak.
 
The air was crisp and her mouth was a kettle at tea time;
I wanted a cup.
 
Lunchtime ended, and I was late getting back to work.

To me the speaker is a bit cynical in the first stanza. He doesn't exactly "paint" this girl with positive descriptions. The words "sagged, crooked, and forced" make the speaker seem at first like this is just another encounter with an attractive woman, nothing special. The change in his tone surfaces after he watches her relax for a while. Suddenly the sleeping beauty is more important than the days "business", uh oh. The image of the leaf falling in the woman's hair seems to me like something small that the newly enthralled speaker mistakes as huge. His interest has sprung at the idea of an act of nature intervening, but in reality it is autumn. The air is "crisp" and leaves are coming down in droves. Even so for our speaker the leaf translates into a physical attraction that he ponders over a little too long...

This is just me, but the whole tea time kettle/mouth metaphor didn't work for me. If I read that a girl's mouth is a kettle at tea time, I imagine her whistling, which isn't the case here. Maybe it's a British thing?... I don't know, it just wasn't the WOW factor I was hoping for. Honestly it could be paraphrased with only changing a few words, "her mouth is hot, I want to kiss it." I think the speaker has a little more passion at this point than that. I do love that he was late to work though, it reinforces what you already implied implicitly.