The Hour Undressed
after Emily Dickinson
The Hour undressed — as Women do — Deliberate — and slow — It laid the Collar of the Light Upon a Chair — below —
I did not speak. One does not speak When Ceremony comes — One folds the Hands the way the Dusk Folds up its little Rooms —
And when the Dark had taken all It came for — and had gone — I found the House unchanged, and me A smaller thing therein.
Dickinson kept turning ordinary intervals — noon, dusk, the moment before weather — into events with a moral weight. This poem borrows that habit of treating a time of day as though it were a visitor.