A creekside shed takes shape only fitfully in Risa Bear’s “Of Country Folk in August,” because the real occupation is looking. The speaker and companions pause from raftering and roofing to lean against the fresh framing, sip solar tea, and watch a neighbor’s horses drift across a pasture. The scene seems idyllic, yet the poem’s central insight is that pastoral leisure is not innocent: to watch is also to appraise, and to appraise is already a form of wanting.
The poem is unrhymed and written in loose free verse, its rhythms governed less by meter than by the lazy syntax of a hot afternoon. Lines run over casually, as when the sun “reached round the fir and baked us down / from raftering, roofing, or the like.” That “or the like” is telling—work is indefinite, interruptible, almost an afterthought. The imagery in the opening stanza is languid and visual: a cloud’s edge becomes a “long skirt” chasing the horses “down the camas swale / and up the other side,” while maple-shrouded hills make a dark backdrop. The “fresh framing” of the walls suggests a structure still mostly open to the air, a skeleton of future labor, but the human attention already feels complete as the horses “amble up to our corner, stand and watch.” The poem quickly becomes a mutual watching, not a one-sided spectacle.
That mutuality tightens in the second stanza. The humans offer grass and coaxing words, but “We couldn’t cure them of the shies.” The word “cure” implies the horses’ wariness is an ailment, a nuisance to be managed. Seen from the animals’ side, however, the wariness makes sense: they look back at “our self-assured, predatory faces, eyes front, / gazing on them, horse-flesh accountants / by their reckoning.” The metaphor is sharp and central. The horses do not see friendly neighbors; they see creatures who calculate value. “Accountants” and “reckoning” belong to the world of ownership and exchange, not pasture idyll, and they expose the economic appetite underneath the scene. The horses answer in their own idiom: flanks shiver, forefeet stamp, “scoring the earth in a language built of weight.” That phrase gives their fear a dignity and a physical grammar—one made of pressure, resistance, and the ground itself.
Sound and movement end the encounter. A chisel hefted or water bottle sloshed, “spattering sun,” sends the horses hammering up the swale. The alliteration and active verbs—“sloshed,” “spattering,” “hammer”—jolt the poem out of its dreaminess, as the animals’ departure does. Then the poem closes with its most disquieting line: “Lovingly we’d watch them go, coveting / our neighbors’ lands and all that lived thereon, / as country folk in August always do.” The adverb “lovingly” almost softens the verb “coveting,” but the biblical echo of craving a neighbor’s goods sharpens it. The final generalization turns personal observation into a proverb, though a wry one. August, the month of ripeness and heat, becomes the season of longing.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to sentimentalize country life. It acknowledges the beauty of horses, hills, and sun-tea, but also the acquisitive gaze that can accompany rural leisure. The horses are given a perspective that resists human romance; their shying is a kind of knowledge. The “language built of weight” suggests a way of being in the world that people can watch but not fully own, and that is precisely what the speaker’s wanting eye cannot account for.