The gardener in Risa Bear’s “Rhythm” moves through a bed of seedlings as if through a liturgy. She sets down her padded bench, a flat, and a trowel, lowers herself “as if in prayer,” digs a hole exactly large enough for the root ball, settles the plant, and repeats the sequence. The poem’s subject is not gardening as accomplishment but gardening as cadence: a routine of kneeling, digging, packing, and rising whose meaning lies in the doing rather than in any finished bed.
Enjambment makes the reader move at the worker’s pace. Lines break after “at the / End of a bed,” “three / Or four times,” and “some / Four plants,” so the eye and voice hesitate in the same places the body pauses. There is little end-rhyme, but the poem does not need it; its order comes from recurrence and from the tactile music of short, verb-heavy phrases: “drop as if in prayer, / Reach for the trowel,” “dig, then grope for a pot,” “tips the damp / Mass in, packs with trowel.” The return of the word “rhythm” at the start of the second stanza carries the reader from observation into meditation.
The imagery insists on physical particularity. The trowel is “bent for her old / Hand at right angles”; the bench is padded; the holes are “deep and wide enough / To exactly take the root ball.” These details honor the body and the tools. The gardener is not performing an abstract spiritual exercise; she is working with an aged hand and a rough trowel. In her own shade she “carefully / Holds” the damp root mass, protecting it from exposure. The vocabulary turns slowly from gardening language toward a discipline of contemplation: rhythm becomes prayer, supplication, centeredness, simplicity. Yet the poem never leaves the soil. Even the final image is tactile: “Kneeling to simply do with her rough hands.”
The comparison to “monks or nuns in supplication” is not decorative. It redefines the gardener’s repeated rising and kneeling as a discipline akin to prostration. The religious figures “glide / Easily to the floor, centered, unconcerned / With body or mind, then rise, then glide again.” That phrase, “Outcomes not sought, nor merit earned,” marks the poem’s central insight. The gardener’s rhythm, when it is at its best, is valuable precisely because it is not aimed at reward. She works to the end of the bed not to accumulate merit or admiration but “simply” to do what the moment requires. Labor becomes a form of attention: the mind settles into the body’s repeated motions, and the result is not a product but a presence.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet recalibration of value. It treats slow, repetitive, outdoor work—often overlooked or sentimentalized—as a genuine contemplative practice without severing it from roughness and physical effort. The meditation is not added to the work; it is the work, carried in the same hands that dig and pack. By allowing the line breaks, tactile details, and prayer-like comparisons to slow the reader, “Rhythm” offers its own rhythm as an invitation: to kneel, to attend, and to let the task be enough.