A cliff is usually a place of endings; in Risa Bear’s “Eighty-Seven” it becomes a place of simultaneous opening. The title gives only a number. If read as an age, it places the speaker late in life, near an edge often associated with death or farewell. Yet the poem does not mourn or hesitate. Its central gesture is one of quiet readiness: the speaker arrives at “a suitable cliff” just as the sky reveals a hawk “riding wind.” The edge is not a fall; it is a threshold where earth and air exchange glances.
The whole poem unfolds as one sentence across five brief lines. “Even as I came” establishes a first-person movement; “to a suitable cliff” completes the destination. That word “suitable” is crucial. The cliff is not random, not terrible, but fit—chosen in some way, or at least accepted. Then the stanza breaks, and the poem turns upward: “clouds opened / to a hawk.” The grammar matters. The clouds do not merely open; they open to a hawk, as though the bird is the thing revealed. “Riding wind” follows the hawk, but the line break lets the phrase hover: the hawk rides, and perhaps the speaker’s attention rides with it. The missing article in “riding wind” matters too—the hawk rides not one breeze but wind as an element, the way a boat rides water. The final period after “wind” ends the sentence, yet the image keeps moving.
Imagery works by contrast and release. The cliff is solid, vertical, humanly chosen; the clouds are soft and changing; the hawk is alive, sharp, airborne; the wind is invisible but forceful. Each image is concrete, but none is explained. The poem does not say what the speaker feels. Instead, the opening clouds and the riding hawk become the feeling. “Opened” is the turning word, suggesting a veil parting or a door in the sky. “Riding” does the work of freedom: the hawk is not flapping, not fighting, not falling. It rests on the air’s movement, carried by something larger than itself. That is the poem’s quiet reassurance—if the speaker is at an ending, the sky is already offering a form of ease.
The sound is spare and unhurried. Short lines create pauses, as if the reader must step carefully toward the cliff. There is no rhyme, but there is a slight phrasal balance: “clouds opened” and “riding wind” each carry two stresses, giving the close a calm, suspended rhythm. The punctuation is minimal—a comma after “cliff,” a comma after “hawk,” a single period at the end. Each mark slows the line without stopping the larger sentence. That slowing is part of the poem’s attitude. It does not rush toward meaning, and it does not need to.
What makes “Eighty-Seven” significant is its ability to turn a potentially dark moment into a clean, natural image without denying the darkness. The cliff remains a place of risk; the title’s number still hints at age and limit. But the poem does not argue, console, or explain. It records a coincidence of arrival and vision: just at the edge, something opens. Readers are left with the hawk and the wind, not with a lesson. The poem’s brevity is its strength. It gives only enough to make the moment visible, then releases the reader into the same open air.