Risa Bear’s “What She Will Do” begins with an ordinary plan: a woman will walk, lean on an apple staff, and check the vegetables and berries. The first stanza, though, places that routine against a vast horizon. She leans on the staff “more and yet more / The nearer arriving to a last heart beat / She comes.” A garden walk becomes a walk toward death. The poem then turns to a gardener’s inventory — peas, onions, leeks, lettuce, tomatoes — and lets that inventory measure what a life can still use, enjoy, and wait for.
The construction follows the movement of the walk. The split “take in / Hand her apple staff” forces a small pause between absorbing the morning and taking the staff in hand. The second stanza’s syntax spills over the line endings — “almost out of / Lettuce” — so each item seems discovered one row at a time. The free verse does not rely on regular rhyme, but it builds on small echoes: “ago” and “go,” “morning” and “more,” the persistent word “yet.” These returns give the lines a shape that feels natural rather than song-like. The third-person voice also keeps the woman slightly outside herself, as if the mind is watching the body with the same attention it gives the garden.
The imagery is concrete and domestic: blanching peas, too-small leeks, tomatoes “doing well,” kale, collards, chard. Yet the poem fills that plain produce with feeling. The woman is “not as / Eager for them as three days ago,” a sign of fading appetite or energy. She could cut the leafy greens, but she is “hungry for something more.” That hunger remains deliberately unnamed. It could be a hunger for later-season fruit, for more days, or for a satisfaction the garden cannot provide. The list of absent crops — “pears, / Apples, zukes, potatoes, corn, or beans” — sounds like longing for a future that may never arrive. In late spring, those crops are still weeks or months away, and the first stanza has already told us the woman is near her last heartbeat.
The word “yet” drives the poem’s sense of time: “more and yet more,” “yet more peas,” “too small yet,” “there are yet no pears.” Each “yet” balances patience against limit. The title’s future tense — what she will do — gives way to the line “Do what she will,” a phrasing that concedes how little an individual will can change the season. The garden is full of processes that demand waiting, but waiting is exactly what she may not have. That tension keeps the poem from becoming either cheerful or morbid. It refuses to pretend that death is absent, but it also refuses to let death erase the taste of peas and tomatoes.
What gives the poem its significance is its refusal to inflate the subject. The woman does not rage at time. She walks, leans, checks, notes what is ready. The final line, “You must make with what you have,” shifts directly to the reader, and it feels earned because it follows the rows and specific hungers of the garden. The phrase sounds like a compressed version of “make do with,” and that compression gives it a plain, almost breathless finality. Even the apple staff she leans on belongs to the orchard world: a support made from the same growing world that still withholds its apples. The poem holds that support and that loss together and asks only that the walk be taken.