In Risa Bear’s “Learning to Walk,” the speaker looks back on a lifetime of walking—to school, through wilderness, into work—and then arrives at a late-life lesson: walking is not measured by miles but by the quality of attention brought to each step. The central idea is that the lifelong habit of moving forward, often through strain and loss, gradually becomes a practice of presence. The dog she keeps in later life teaches not how to go, but how to stop, sniff, and receive the world.
The poem is built in four five-line stanzas. Its most obvious structural pattern is the repeated phrase “She’d walked,” which begins three of the first four movements and gathers the speaker’s whole life into one continuous motion. The free verse has no regular rhyme, but its rhythm comes from enjambment and long, clause-packed lines that spill past expected pauses. When the line breaks at “chatting in / her offhand way” or “block after block / of homes,” the form mimics both forward movement and the small hesitations of a body navigating terrain. The stanzas are even, but the sentences keep sliding across their edges, as if the act of walking cannot be contained by a single line.
The imagery moves between violence and tenderness. The school bus is “yellow lozenges, oozing screams” that “fumed past her along hot asphalt,” so the everyday journey to school smells of exhaust and noise. By contrast, the girl “splashed the creek, / anxious for a path, then built it herself,” learning to use her father’s axe without injury. That small detail suggests independence earned through risk. The wilderness stretches from Springer Mountain north, where she meets “bears, a big cat and a ghost,” a phrase that lets fact and hallucination walk side by side. Later images pair academic halls with hills and “seedling trees” planted beside “raw stumps of firs machines had eaten.” The word “eaten” makes logging feel bodily and urgent, and “snug up to” gives the replanting an almost domestic gentleness. Her years of work are compressed into “homes with eyes of black glass” inching past her “tired, angry shoes,” where tiredness and anger attach to the shoes rather than the person, as if walking itself has absorbed the strain.
The turn comes with “Now, late in life.” The dog is “bereft by her parents’ breathing stopped,” a phrase that softens death into a quiet ending of breath. What the dog teaches is deliberately small: “when to stop and sniff; how to attend with one’s / whole being the business of squirrels.” The leash is called “that necessary thing,” a constraint that becomes connection, joining woman and dog “as one.” The final sentence gathers five verbs—“take in, absorb, imbibe, inhale, entaste”—each a different register of openness. The word “entaste” feels newly coined, as if the speaker is inventing language for a perception she has only just learned. The last line turns that openness toward “all the arriving and leaving of living things,” joining the senses to mortality and impermanence.
The poem is significant because it treats aging not as the end of movement but as a transformation of it. A life spent walking through danger, labor, and grief leads not to rest but to a slower, more receptive walking. The repeated “She’d walked” gives the past momentum; the dog gives the present a method. By the close, walking has become a way of paying attention, which is perhaps the only way to live alongside all that arrives and leaves.