Poser 4 won't even display the tick (U.S. check) mark to apply a pose at the bottom of the Pose pallet unless at least one figure is loaded in the document. A workround is to convert a Poser square prop into a figure, set visibility off for the square_1 actor, then with this figure loaded set the preferred state. This will cause the invisible figure to load in the default doc so that you can immediately apply poses to props, it's also handy for parenting a group of items to so that they can be moved or scaled together. If you prefer you could also use a NULL Figure instead, but then you could not use it to move or scale groups, because a NULL figure does not usually have any translation or scale channels.