The question that opens “Where Are the Potatoes” is both literal and larger than a missing crop. An aging gardener watches heat shimmer across a corn block whose leaves are already rustling and turning brown, and asks where the potatoes have gone from the next bed. On the surface, this is a small domestic drama of scarcity: she planted carefully, as she has for fifty years, and the harvest disappoints. But the poem’s central idea lives in its final line—work with what is. Gardening appears not as a promise of abundance but as a long, unglamorous bargain with soil, weather, and a body that must now be lowered onto a stool.
The poem is written in free verse, without rhyme or regular meter, and its single unbroken block of lines feels suited to the patient, repetitive work it describes. Enjambment keeps the action moving forward, line into line, as if following the gardener’s hands. “Pulled block after block of solid hexagonal clod / Over, busting up each as she went, feeling for / That coolness she knew as round starch balls” makes the weight of the soil tangible. The hard stresses in “solid hexagonal clod” slow the line, mimicking the effort of turning dry earth, while “coolness” and “round starch balls” shift into a more intimate, bodily memory. She does not merely see potatoes; she knows them by touch, by the cool curve her fingers have trusted all her life.
Bear’s language turns on small, significant repetitions. The word “exactly” appears when she recalls planting “really exactly as she had done these fifty years” and again when she sits “exactly at the end of that mysterious weedy bed.” That exactness is both a form of care and a quiet irony: precise labor has not produced a reliable result. The bed is “mysterious” because the earth has its own logic, one that does not answer to her experience. The poem also insists on what the gardener has not failed to do: “It’s not / That she hadn’t watered and weeded, no, / Or fought those gophers well.” The phrasing defends her effort before any blame settles. “Earth could not drink for once, it seemed” personifies the ground as unable rather than unwilling, a subtle but important distinction. The failure belongs to conditions, not to neglect.
The harvest itself is described as an inventory of damage. “Some spuds appeared. They were even / Smaller than those from last year. Some felt / Hollow. Some were cracked. Some were / Even green with poisons.” The repeated “some” turns the crop into a list of losses, each potato a different kind of disappointment. The green ones are especially unsettling, marked by poison despite growing “well deep enough never to have seen sun.” The natural order seems slightly off, as if the earth has broken its usual rules.
Yet the poem does not end in despair. The gardener’s response is practical: “I’ll take what I can get,” she thinks, and plans soups stretched with barley, dandelion, and kale. “Barley I bought” quietly admits that survival sometimes depends on what comes from beyond the garden. The final lines broaden the poem’s scope: “Ere I go forth from here as buried flesh or ash, I’ll / Do as I have done: work with what is.” The old-fashioned “ere” and the mention of buried flesh or ash bring mortality into the garden without melodrama. What makes the poem significant is its refusal to romanticize either nature or labor. It honors persistence without promising reward, and it finds dignity not in a perfect harvest but in the willingness to bend, dig, adapt, and continue.