Risa Bear’s “These Are Highlands” begins by almost refusing to be remarkable: “These are highlands, in a region of highlands, so / not especially notable.” The speaker offers directions for a walk—gravel road, short path, a sign-in kiosk, water and lunch—as though guiding a companion into a wilderness that is modest and particular. Only at the very end does the real destination surface: a nearby stone “where both my parents’ ashes lie at rest.” The central idea is that an ordinary landscape, closely observed, can hold private grief and memory; the trail becomes a quiet pilgrimage, and the poem becomes an understated elegy written in the details of plants, soil, and weather rather than in open lament.
The poem is built in unrhymed couplets, but its music comes less from meter than from enjambment and the rhythm of a speaking voice. Lines break mid-phrase—“It takes a long / time to get there,” “first / vanilla leaf, then devil’s club, then red / huckleberry”—so the reader pauses, reconsiders, and moves forward much as a walker does on uneven ground. The second-person address (“bring a lunch and water,” “Sign in,” “do not lose the path”) turns the reader into the speaker’s companion and gives the poem the texture of a trail guide. Yet the final request, “Wait here for me a bit,” shifts from instruction into intimacy: we are no longer being told how to walk, but asked to pause outside a private moment.
Imagery is precise and botanical, and that precision matters. The speaker names Douglas fir, mountain hemlock, red cedar, vine maple, ocean spray, rhododendron, willow, bear grass, vanilla leaf, devil’s club, huckleberry, kinnickinnick, twinflowers, trilliums, gooseberry, false Solomon’s seal, ceanothus. The list is not decorative; it roots the poem in a specific place and an attentive mind. Repeated words keep pointing toward lateness and decline: springs are “dry,” plants are “past bloom,” “tired now,” and “long for snow.” The mountain beavers are present only by their holes and “go abroad at night,” so the walker is surrounded by invisible life. That sense of hiddenness prepares for the final revelation of hidden ashes.
Midway, the path “turns upon itself and climbs,” and the poem’s landscape shifts from shaded forest to exposed slope: andesite, alpine fir, red dust, ceanothus. The view that opens is grand but also eroded—“scree and scarp and what remains of ice.” The phrase “what remains” quietly anticipates the human remains at the end. Significantly, the speaker calls this “that view / eyes come here to see,” then does not rest there. The true destination is a stone nearby, away from the panorama. The poem gently reverses that expectation: the scenic high point is not the emotional high point.
What makes “These Are Highlands” significant is the way it folds elegy into a naturalist’s walk. The final line is deliberately plain, mostly monosyllabic, without metaphor: “where both my parents’ ashes lie at rest.” It lands with the weight of the whole preceding journey. Rereading the poem, the dry springs and tired plants no longer seem merely seasonal; they become figures for grief, dormancy, and the approach of snow. The highlands are “not especially notable” in a geographic sense, but by the end they are a personal sacred site. The poem suggests that close attention to the actual world is a way of carrying the dead, and that a path need not be dramatic to be a road of remembrance.