"No use looking now / I'm gone." Rhoda Clark opens like a note pinned to a door, the kind that says *gone fishing*. This speaker, though, has "gone / to BEING." The little joke of the idiom carries a serious claim. The poem argues that once we drop our disguises, along with the weight of the past and the lure of the future, the present moment needs nothing added to it. In the poem's own words, "IS IN BEING ENOUGH."
The poem enacts this by undressing. "Coverings left / in heaps on the floor" works as a literal picture of clothes shed, and also as a picture of pretenses abandoned. The sandals are "shot like stars across the room," a burst of energy that makes the stripping feel like release rather than loss. Stars are scattered, bright and far away, so the image hints that the discarded things have become part of a larger sky. Two slashes also do quiet work. In "floor/sandals" the slash tacks the sandals onto the heap like an afterthought. In "mostly it was lies/no matter now" it lets the verdict and the dismissal run together, with barely a breath between them. The word "mostly" is easy to miss, but it matters. The speaker doesn't claim that the whole past was false, only most of it, and that small honesty makes the rest more believable.
The middle of the poem shifts from lightness to weight. "Yesterday's time falls heavy at my feet" suggests time as a garment that has dropped and now pools around the ankles. This is one of the few lines that settles into a steady, near ten-syllable beat, so the rhythm itself seems to fall. The speaker is then "poised uncovered trembling," three words with no punctuation between them, so that poise and fear sit side by side. Standing "at the peak of sharper pyramids than these," the speaker looks down on pyramids, the ultimate human monuments to time and death. The heaps of clothing on the floor may be small pyramids themselves, and the speaker has climbed to something more precarious. The next line, "invisible without my time," is ambiguous. It could mean the speaker is invisible once time is removed, or that these pyramids are. Either way, the poem suggests that much of what looks solid depends on time to hold it up.
That thought leads to the poem's sharpest image. The speaker is "not now digging relics / in a future blasted out of infinite." Digging relics is normally something we do to the past, so putting it in the future is strange and clever. It describes the habit of living for what we will leave behind, for the monument and the legacy. "Blasted" makes the future sound quarried, cut violently out of the endless. Against this, the moment is "winged," a single light word set against yesterday's heaviness.
The form follows the argument. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, just slashes, so nothing is neatly fastened down. Capitals are used sparingly, only on "BEING" and on the line "IS IN BEING ENOUGH." Those words almost shout, as if the speaker is amazed to say them. The short lines at the start read like quick, breathless movements, and the longer middle lines slow into the weight of memory. Then the ending speeds up again: "the moment winged / without lies / uncovered IS."
That last line loops back to the title, "Moment Uncovered Is," and the grammar of both is deliberately open. "Uncovered" could describe the moment or name what happens to it, and "IS" is left without a complement, with nothing after it to say what the moment is. This is the poem's cleverest move. A sentence that finished by naming something would be covering the moment with a label, and by stopping at "IS" the poem stays uncovered itself.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't just talk about honesty and presence. It performs them, shedding its punctuation, its rhyme and even its sentence endings as the speaker sheds clothes. It also admits the cost, since the speaker is "trembling," and being is not presented as comfortable. It is presented as enough.