Risa Bear’s “Sixty-Seven” opens in the fragile interval between sleep and full consciousness. A voice says, “Starting from sleep, / I turn; see / you resting.” The second-person “you” is intimate and unnamed; the verb “resting” suggests calm, but because the scene is immediately corrected, it also becomes an emblem of absence. The speaker’s mind has supplied a companion where perhaps there is none. Then, in four small words, the vision collapses: “But, no. It is / a trick of light.” The poem’s central idea lives in that correction. It is about the mind’s hunger for presence, the way waking perception can briefly restore what the heart wants to see, and the flat truth that follows. By the end, the speaker does not say “I am alone” but “I remain / among those / who live alone.” Grief or solitude becomes not a private feeling but a shared condition, and the title, suggesting a specific age, adds the weight of long years to that condition.
The poem is built from short, halting units, as though the lines themselves are learning to breathe again. “Starting from sleep,” is only four syllables, and the comma holds it open. “I turn; see” compresses a whole sequence of movement and recognition into three stressed monosyllables; the semicolon makes turning and seeing almost simultaneous. “you resting.” then closes the sentence with a period, giving the illusion a false sense of completion. The correction arrives in a new sentence that is itself fractured: “But, no. It is / a trick of light.” The line break after “It is” delays the explanation for just a beat, letting the reader share the speaker’s hesitation before reality is named. The final three lines settle into a pattern: “I remain / among those / who live alone.” Each line is three syllables until the last, which lengthens to four. The slight expansion on “who live alone” gives the ending a quiet, resigned emphasis. There is no rhyme, but there are echoes: the sibilance of “Starting,” “sleep,” “see,” and “resting” links the hazy first view, while the t sounds of “But,” “trick,” and “light” sharpen the waking correction.
The imagery is almost entirely visual yet minimal. The poem gives no room, no face, no time of day—only the “trick of light” that stands in for the missing person. Light, which usually reveals, here deceives; it forms a shape convincing enough for the speaker to say “you.” The word “trick” matters because it suggests not just error but a kind of cruel joke played by the senses. “Remain” is also carefully weighted. To remain is to stay, to persist, to be left behind. The speaker does not wake into loneliness; she wakes from a brief illusion back into a loneliness that was already there. “Among those” is important, too. The speaker does not claim uniqueness; she places herself in a category of people who live alone, as if recognizing herself from outside. That small shift from “I” to “those” gives the ending a communal sorrow without needing to describe it further.
What makes the poem significant is its concentration. In just twenty-three words, it moves through three emotional states—tenderness, doubt, resignation—without wasting a syllable. The opening feels almost like a love poem, the middle like a mistake corrected, the ending like a census of the heart. Because it refuses to explain who “you” is or why the speaker lives alone, the poem leaves space for a reader’s own losses. Its power is that it does not describe grief; it stages the moment when grief is briefly suspended and then restored. The “trick of light” is not sentimental. It is a small, everyday betrayal, and the final line accepts it with a quiet clarity that makes the poem feel both personal and strangely universal.