Risa Bear’s poem “She Knows” begins not with anecdote but with certainty: “She knows the weeds will win.” The statement is so flat and assured that the drama comes not from whether the weeds will win but from what a person does with that knowledge. The “she” of the title is a gardener whose sleep is invaded by her adversary. She dreams of weeds growing and wakes to hallucinate their textures, “grasp / Even in her two hands, a phantom thistle, or / Knotweed, errant blackberry, or teasel.” The line break after “grasp” isolates the verb, making the gesture feel physical and startled, as though the war against wildness has crossed from the garden into her body and unconscious.
The poem’s form mirrors that intrusion. It unfolds as one unbroken block of free verse, with no stanza breaks to offer rest. Its line lengths are uneven, and several lines end on active verbs—“grasp,” “throw,” “steps”—so that the movement spills forward. Yet the diction stays deliberately plain and domestic: robe, gate, corn, tomatoes, kale, chard. That ordinary language makes the more surreal details land. Cultivated plants are given gentle voices: “There might be corn and tomatoes chatting, / Having about as much to say as farmed things.” The phrase “farmed things” is quietly wry; these plants are tame, perhaps even a little dull. Even the whisper among kale and chard is uncertain: “Whatever such things say.”
The weeds, by contrast, do not speak. Beyond the tended beds lie rows “Ensnarled in dock, barnyardgrass, bindweed, / Everlasting morning glory vines.” The word “Ensnarled” makes the garden beds sound captured, tangled like nets. The heavy consonance of “dock, barnyardgrass, bindweed” slows the line, evoking dense, stubborn growth, while “Everlasting morning glory vines” stretches out as if the vine itself cannot stop. The speaker calls the scene “Dire straits; but there’s no sound there.” That silence is more menacing than noise. The weeds are not wrestling for space because they are confident. They are “biding their time, / Watching for her sudden return, sickle / In hand, fire in eye, seed packets in mind.” The gardener imagines herself as a threatening figure armed with tool and intention, yet the active verbs belong to the weeds—“biding,” “watching,” “fear.” They wait; she merely returns. “Seed packets in mind” even undercuts her ferocity: she is still dreaming of future planting, carrying hope into a battle she says is already lost.
That blend of humor and unease is central to the poem’s tone. When she steps into her “lightless house,” the adjective extends the dark garden inward, blurring the boundary between the wild outside and the domestic interior. The ending is deliberately unconsoling: “She’ll give this up / Not soon, yet knows how it must end.” The phrase “Not soon” is not a promise of victory or even of endurance; it is a postponement. She will not surrender immediately, but she does not pretend the ending can change. Her knowledge is not despairing, exactly. It is clarity.
What makes the poem significant is its unsentimental view of cultivation. Gardening here is not a simple metaphor for renewal or hope. Instead, Bear offers a version of the pastoral in which tending is an argument with inevitability—an argument the gardener knows she cannot win. The individual gestures of rising, listening, wielding a sickle, and saving seed matter not because they will defeat the weeds but because they are the life she chooses to keep. The weeds may have the final victory, but the poem stays with the woman’s stubborn, wakeful resistance.