3/4 Time

That vacation you promised we'd go dancing

and this was our chance

through the cluttered galleries of the county museum

the only people there.

We would separate two months later

meanwhile we spun in halls filled with things I'd never

seen:

flower wreaths the local women wove from human hair,

a Cadillac hearse from 1932,

an exhibit called "Eighteen Ways To Tell Time."

The Chinese looked a cat in the eye and knew-

its pupil rounded in the morning,

narrowed to a slit at noon,

then filled out like a moon at midnight.

Nothing was said about the way a door closes

who is left in, who out,

the way an eyelid shuts by reflex

blinks open to find the scene changed, you gone.