Two people fail to say the one thing that matters, and the poem makes that failure feel almost mechanical. In William Dickey's "In the Appropriate Moment," a relationship ends not with a quarrel or a confession but with a series of missed cues. She leaves, then he tries to speak, then she is gone, and finally he shuts a door on an empty room. What the poem is really about is timing, and the cruelty of timing: how two people can be so out of step that even their silences fail to coincide.
The governing image is the clock, and Dickey makes it do double duty. In the opening lines the woman arrives "like a clock / Striking the local hour's meridian," a phrase that gives her departure the cold precision of a scheduled chime. Then the speaker answers in kind: "my hand, a clockwork, rose to strike." Both figures have become machinery, going through motions that are perfectly formed and completely out of sync. By the last stanza the clock "stood struck and dumb," a lovely compression. It has sounded its hour, and it is also stunned, struck in the way a person is struck by bad news. The word "struck" swings between sound and blow, so the poem's central object is at once a timepiece and a casualty.
The poem's title and its refrain-like openings play on irony. "The appropriate moment" sounds like etiquette, the right time to speak or leave, yet nothing here is appropriate in any comfortable sense. The phrase returns at the start of the final stanza, now describing the speaker's own act of closing the door "like a door," a simile so flat and exact that it feels like a shrug. The repetition shows that he has learned to imitate her: she exited on the beat, and he finishes on the beat. Each is appropriate and neither is understood.
Dickey's handling of the telephone is the most unsettling stretch of imagery. "Her voice had crumpled her along the wire; / There was only a voiceless body in her chair." Voice and body come apart, as if the call has drawn her essence out through the line and left a husk behind. When the speaker "wired itself to talk," his own body is described in the same electrical vocabulary, so the two are linked by the very metaphor that keeps them apart. Communication here is all circuitry and no contact. Even the verb "paraded" is telling. She is "paraded to be marching out," a phrase with something stiffly ceremonial about it, as though her leaving were drilled rather than felt.
The form supports all this. The poem runs in four quatrains with a loose, slightly slanting rhyme: "clock" and "strike" and "talk" are not quite echoed, but "in" and "been," "wire" and "chair," "throat" and "about" pull toward one another without fully locking. The effect is of a pattern almost completed and then withheld, which mirrors the story of two people who almost connect. The lines move in a steady, measured beat that suits the ticking theme, and the repeated closing formula, "And never a word to tell where she had been," then "why she had come," frames the affair between two unanswered questions. At the start she leaves without saying where she has been, and at the end the speaker wonders why she ever came. The lovers never exchange anything, and the mystery bookends the poem.
What makes the poem memorable is its refusal to supply a villain or a cause. We are told she hates "hours concluded in," yet that hatred is never explained, and the speaker's own silence is just as unexplained. By the end she is "already someone else's home," a startling phrase that treats a person as a place others can enter, and it hints, though only hints, that the speaker has been replaced, or that she was never his to begin with. The poem leaves that for the reader to decide. Its force comes from how little it says: a loss rendered in the tidy, clipped language of clocks, where the real tragedy is that nobody spoke in time.