Girl in a Museum

She must have come from mirrors in her practice room. A dark wisp strayed from the coil of hair at the back of her head, her short skirt clinging to her hips as she purled against a tide of wanderers in the round Museum of Science, striding like a dancer, gliding by the steel spring in mirrors, spurning the conical dish with coins spiraling downward through a dark center, stepping elegantly around the narrow beam where entranced seekers inched back and forth, adjusting their mass against bulky counterweights,

as if she, by a wave of her hand, might subdue natural laws; strolling in mild curiosity by the pendulum and ball toppling wooden pegs hour by hour in its measured swing and rotation through each day,

departing then, perhaps back to her mirrored room to bend and stretch in her music.

Among watchers cycling with the clock, some noticed that she seemed out of place, or putting on airs. Most failed to see her St. Ann smile, imperturbable, those long tapered legs, toes pointing just so with each step, and her gliding like a swan on a calm lake, undisturbed in a wilderness of stark assertions.