Read the title and the first line as one sentence and the poem opens with a small jolt: "Present tense / where the present goes / backward instead of forward." There is no capital letter and no full stop to steady it. The poem starts mid-thought, in a place where time runs the wrong way. "Present tense" works twice here. It is a grammatical label, and it also means strained and tightly held, which is the mood the rest of the poem takes up.
What follows is a single glimpsed scene. The speaker "saw her dressing herself / to dress the dead." We are never told who she is, where this happens, or whose body is waiting. She might be an undertaker, a mourner, or a performer in some ritual, but the poem withholds this, and judging by its wording it does not need it. The important move is the repeated verb. "Dressing herself" is ordinary, putting on clothes, while "to dress the dead" turns the same word toward the care of a body. The echo makes the two acts mirror each other. She prepares herself in order to prepare someone else, as if the living and the dead were taking part in one ceremony.
The grammar quietly obeys the opening claim. Line one says "goes," which is present tense. Then comes "I saw," which is already past. After that the poem gives up finite verbs altogether. "This kept body treated / all in paint" is built from participles, words that describe a condition rather than an action. The sentence is stuck in a finished state, just like the body, and the present has slid backward into the past and then into a stillness with no tense at all.
"Kept" and "treated" are both double-edged. "Kept" can mean preserved, held on to, or looked after. "Treated" suggests an embalmer's or a doctor's handling, but it also hints at something given as a gift. "All in paint" adds to the ambiguity. Because she has just been "dressing herself," it is possible, though the poem never confirms it, that the painted body is hers rather than the dead person's. The lines let the two bodies blur.
The form is spare. There are four couplets, with no punctuation and no capitals, and the lines shrink as the poem goes on. The longest are seven syllables, near the start, and the last couplet is only two and four syllables, so the poem seems to run out of breath, or to close like a lid. There is no end rhyme, but there is sound-patterning. "Backward" and "forward" share their ending and differ only at the front, so the line contains its own reversal. "Dressing," "dress" and "dead" are linked by the hard d, and "odd" in the final line slips into the same sound, tying strangeness to death by ear.
That last couplet is the most striking part: "with art / with odd love." The two phrases sit side by side with no "and," so art and love carry equal weight, and each begins with "with," as if they were tools laid out on a table. "Odd" is the surprising word. It is understated and honest, admitting that love shown through paint and ritual on a dead body is not ordinary tenderness. It is a little unsettling, and the poem still calls it love. There is no full stop after "love," so the word is left hanging.
The poem matters because it does so much in so few words. It suggests that tending the dead is both craft and devotion, and that it drags the present backward toward memory and loss. It never explains itself, and it trusts the reader to feel the strangeness of the scene. For a student, it shows how much a poem can do with grammar, line breaks and one carefully chosen adjective, and that a poem without rhyme can still have a music of its own.