The poem is titled "NUDE," yet the body never shows up. Instead we get a pile of clothes, a tidy bed, a phone book, and a switched-off television. Only in the final word, "displays," do we learn that someone is in the room at all, and even then she or he is a "lone occupant" and never described. The poem's central idea is that nakedness is most vivid when it is implied. The unselfconscious human presence is set against a room that has been furnished to say nothing.
The poem starts with the clothes, and the language lifts them out of the ordinary. The garments rise "in layers / of ever thinner / firmament," from heavy "denim" through "lightest cotton" to "breath- / less silk." Firmament is an old, grand word for the sky, so the heap becomes an atmosphere that thins as it climbs. The order also reads as an undressing in reverse, with the coarsest layer at the bottom and the most intimate at the top. The line break in "breath- / less" does real work. We hear the silk as light and airy, and we also hear a pause in the breathing, as if the reader had caught the occupant's own breath. Next comes "a trickle / of sunlight / spilling through a crack," which turns light into liquid and gives the scene a slight warmth.
Then the poem turns on the word "While," and the furniture takes over. The bed is "prim" and "unwrinkled," and the poet gives it a disapproving manner. The nightstand is "generic" and "pinned under / a thick phone book," as if it might otherwise wander off. The television is "blank." Judging by these details, the setting feels like a rented or impersonal room, though the poem never says so. Everything in it "resist[s] / engagement," a phrase with several meanings: the objects refuse to hold the eye, and they refuse any theatrical or romantic involvement. Even "chest / of drawers" quietly jokes about bodies and underwear, with the furniture standing in for the person who isn't pictured.
The poem is full of theatre. The room is a set, and its objects are "properties." The "enchanted gaze" and "bemused / appraisal" suggest an audience, perhaps even the viewer of a life-drawing class or a painted nude. The last sentence imagines a "stage / hand" who would object to "such inattention / to properties." The word also nudges toward "propriety," which the occupant has dropped along with the clothes. The "utter abandon" the occupant displays, by flinging clothes about and ignoring the tidy room, is the poem's real subject. It is more alive than anything in the staged space.
The form carries the same attitude. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, in lines that rarely run past four or five syllables. Short lines and sharp enjambments slow the reader down as if the speaker were looking and noticing. The grammar is held back too. The opening is a run of phrases with no main verb, and "While" sets up a contrast that only resolves at "resist." The subject of the last sentence, "this room's lone / occupant," arrives at the very end. The effect is like a camera moving slowly across a room before it reaches its subject, who has been there all along. The ampersands ("silk &", "phone book &") give the page a casual, jotted look that suits the loose abandon it describes.
The poem is significant because it plays with one of art's oldest subjects. The nude is usually a body arranged to be looked at, and here the body is withheld and only its traces are shown. It is also quite funny, in the way it fusses over an ignored bed and an unwatched television. In place of a body to be admired, the poem offers a person defined by what she or he has dropped, and the poem finds that freer and more interesting. Readers are left to complete the picture, and the poem seems to trust that imagination can do this better than a description could.