A walk through a forest becomes a quiet ritual of naming in Risa Bear’s “Twenty-Six.” The speaker says, “As I pass through, / I may touch ash, / Hemlock, fir,” then continues through a long catalogue of trees before arriving at the one thing that cannot be touched: “you.” The poem is about absence, and more precisely about how longing attaches itself to the physical world. One after another, the speaker can reach ash, hemlock, fir, spruce, alder, maple, cedar, madrone, yew, willow, dark myrtle—but that contact only sharpens the one impossible contact. The natural world may offer texture, presence, even consolation, but it is finally not the beloved.
The phrase “pass through” in the opening line carries a faint shadow of mortality: the speaker may be walking through a forest, or moving through a life, perhaps out of it. The poem is built as a single accumulating sentence. After the initial clause, “I may touch” introduces an inventory that keeps delaying the sentence’s end. Each short line holds one or two tree names, separated by commas, so reading becomes a processional through the woods. Line breaks fall by breath rather than by meter: “spruce, alder, / maple, cedar, / madrone, yew” create a steady, chant-like rhythm. There is no rhyme, but the names carry internal echoes—hemlock and fir, cedar and alder, willow and dark myrtle—that hold the list together as a whispered sequence.
The only true break in that sequence comes at the end. “Willow, dark / myrtle, but — / not you” introduces a dash after “but,” a small stutter as if the speaker hesitates before naming the absence. The word “dark,” the only adjective in the list, hangs at the end of a line and shades the poem just before the turn. Before it, the speaker passes among named, tangible things; after it, the sentence lands on a two-word negative, “not you,” isolated on a line of its own with two firm stresses. The contrast between the expansive list and that brief denial is the emotional core: all these presences cannot become the one presence that matters.
The tree names do more than fill space. “Ash” opens the list and quietly suggests remains; yew is often associated with churchyards and memory; willow has long been linked with mourning. Yet the poem does not rely only on symbolic overtones. The specificity of madrone, cedar, alder, and myrtle suggests a particular, lived landscape rather than a set of generic props. Because the speaker can name them in passing, the woods feel intimately known. That intimacy makes the absence of “you” sharper: the speaker knows and can touch everything in this world except the person addressed.
The title “Twenty-Six” adds another kind of number to this poem of names. The text never explains it, and that unexplained quality seems deliberate, like a private marker—an age, a date, a count of years—held just outside the poem’s speech. It frames the catalogue with a number, but the poem refuses to explain the loss. In that reticence lies its power. Rather than describing grief, “Twenty-Six” enacts its logic: the mind turns over the tangible, the nameable, the touchable, while circling the one thing that is none of those. The poem’s force comes from what it withholds—the identity of “you,” the meaning of the title, any direct statement of feeling—and from the single hard turn from all the trees in the world to the one absence that cannot be touched.