A woman lies awake after 3:00 a.m., thinking about a lover who is in jail. The poem never states her feelings outright. Instead it lets images carry them. His reflection in the mirror fades like weak tea made from the same leaves again and again, or like smoke dissolving into the air. Memory, it suggests, thins out the longer someone is gone.
The middle section drifts somewhere stranger: a ship's captain lost at sea, caught in an endless ballad, his watch still ticking. It reads like a dreamlike double for the absent man, someone out of reach while time keeps passing.
The last section returns to the bedroom. Streetlight through the blinds throws crossing stripes on the walls and bed, a pattern that echoes prison bars. She stares into the one dark corner. The mood is quiet, lonely, and a little ghostly, like a scene from a film noir, with the sense of being trapped alongside the person she misses.