A garden is a place of small violences, and Risa Bear’s “J.S. Bach” begins with one: a woman turns up weeds “without pity,” spreading their roots before the sun. The poem follows the seasonal arc of planting, harvesting, and baking Hubbard squash, but its deeper concern is how a person must kill and bury in order to eat, and how that harsh work can end in blessing. Bear does not cover the violence with pastoral charm. She makes it part of the ritual.
The poem’s lines do not pursue a regular rhyme scheme; instead, their music comes from enjambment and repeated, almost ceremonial sentence openings: “She turned up,” “She placed,” “She carried.” That patterned syntax gives the gardener’s labor a liturgical regularity. In the opening, the language is deliberately harsh: the weeds are “banished,” the fork’s “teeth” tear “living soil,” and the dark loam “whispered in protest.” The gardener’s reply—“But what / was she to do? One must eat”—twists necessity and regret into a single breath. The white seeds in their packet “were waiting for the sun,” patient and almost human, yet planting them means burying them: she pinches “their graves over them.” That knot of death and nurture remains at the poem’s center.
The seed packet becomes a strange textual object, inscribed with “runes” such as “Date of last frost,” “zone three,” and “days / to maturity.” The enjambment after “days” makes maturity itself feel delayed, and then the speaker turns the phrase inward: “How many days now to her own / maturity?” The question arrives like a small mortal shock. Her hand trembles, and she pushes the thought away: “Not to be thought of.” Agricultural time briefly becomes human time, and the poem allows the comparison to pass without forcing it.
The Hubbard squash are the poem’s great silent characters. Other crops “talk to her; the Hubbards never do.” They are “dour and uncommunicative,” “huddled like bollards on the high shelf.” The simile gives them weight, dullness, and a strange stubbornness. They withhold meaning until the knife, the oven, and the cookbook authority of “Rombauer & Becker” transform them. Only then does the “silent Hubbard” become “richly dressed,” ready to be carried into the living room.
What makes the poem significant is the way it dignifies ordinary labor without sentimentalizing it. The final act is not merely eating but a litany of gratitude to “the gods of the steel fork and the weeds, / the rainmaker, the packet of white seeds, / booted foot and blue denim bag / and the longtime summer sun.” The title’s music is withheld until the last line, as if the whole garden cycle has been a kind of prelude: many separate, unglamorous tasks entering one by one until, at the table, they sound together in a fugue.