A to-do list rarely sounds like a path to contentment, but Risa Bear’s “The Things to Do” turns a list of small domestic tasks into something closer to a quiet ceremony. The title’s colon promises a plan, yet the plan narrows to one meal rather than a long agenda. The speaker gathers an egg “from her / Hens,” a found apple, beet leaf, and cat’s-ear foliage, insisting on “freshness even in October.” From this unpromising start, the poem builds a meal and, around that meal, an entire philosophy of attention.
The poem’s structure is as modest as its subject. There is no regular meter or rhyme, but the free verse has a practical rhythm, moving with a cook’s pace: short commands, a pause, then a longer unfolding. The list’s imperative verbs—“bring,” “break,” “turn,” “insert,” “remove,” “Give”—keep the poem in motion. Enjambment does important work. The break at “a / Sun rises” isolates the word “Sun” so it seems to rise on the page, and the line “whatever remains to be / Done’s already forgotten” suspends unfinished business before letting it drop. The punctuation also creates a sense of order: each step is separated, completed, and then released.
The imagery is deliberately humble and seasonal. “Cat’s-ear foliage” is a weed, not a delicacy; the apple is “found,” not bought. These choices suggest resourcefulness and a close relationship with the immediate environment. The poem’s music is quiet but precise: “egg” and “apple” share a quick vowel, “beet leaf” and “cat’s-ear” bring garden textures into the mouth, and the familiar pair “salt and pepper” lands like a small domestic rhyme. The skillet gains life when “oil frisking” combines sound and motion; the egg yolk breaks and turns, chopped fruit and greens meet salt and pepper. The food is not fancy, but it is made with care. When she folds it into a “spelt wrap,” the meal feels earthy and nourishing rather than showy. Even the word “freshness” carries weight because the poem wants us to notice that this is October, the edge of the growing season, and yet the speaker has still gathered enough from hens and hedges to eat well.
The strongest shift happens when the focus moves outward from the skillet. As she sits to her meal, the rising sun “invests her eastern window, spills in / To caress and warm six thick maple boards / Of her grandmother’s table.” That verb “invests” is striking: sunlight becomes wealth or blessing, poured into the room. The table is not just furniture; its “six thick maple boards” carry solidity and family history. The grandmother’s table anchors the speaker in a longer domestic lineage, linking this one October morning to all the other mornings that table has known. Light “caress[es]” the wood, and the moment becomes tender rather than merely useful.
The ending renames what has happened. “Whatever remains to be / Done’s already forgotten: the meal an emblem / Of all her morning cared to be.” An emblem is a symbol that carries meaning beyond itself; the wrap embodies attention, sufficiency, and the choice to stop. The poem does not claim all duties are finished, only that they are forgotten for now, because the morning has already become what it wanted to be. That is the poem’s quiet radicalism: a person can be complete in the middle of ordinary life, with an egg, some weeds, an apple, and light on an old table.