Uninvited Reader

She notes in the poem she's reading where the disembodied voice speaking encounters "an ugly old woman" just momentarily, in part of a single line, in one of the many long corridors and sharp turnings of the poem, so that she's quickly lost to view. That's me, she thinks, I'm an ugly old woman, I who sit here reading this poem and its ugly old woman phrase and the poet, when he stumbled over her splayed, swollen legs, registered her presence, her inheritance, her baggage of limitations-ugly, old, woman-but never knew, couldn't, because who could know, who can stop and know her ... And this reader keeps thinking, loving, understanding, trapped in her eye following the voice on and on while somewhere back in the poem in a blank passage an ugly old woman sits against a wall.