A woman with room for land asks a question that sounds like a riddle: “What to do about trees.” The answer she gives herself—“Have an orchard”—immediately raises the problem of time, because an orchard is a promise that outlasts the planter. That tension between present labor and future benefit is the engine of Risa Bear’s “What to Do About Trees.” The woman goes out “in November” with a spade and four apple saplings, and does not stop. Year after year she works “up and around the rise / Of better ground,” adding pears, cherries, and quince, and replacing plums lost to blight. The poem’s central idea arrives in one quietly startling phrase: she keeps planting by “Uncoupling crop from objective.” Harvest and purpose are deliberately separated, so that the labor becomes a gift to a future she will not live to see.
The poem is built as free verse, unrhymed and conversational, with lines that rarely contain a complete clause. Enjambment does the work of a calendar. The sentence “Years she / Did this” forces the reader to cross a line break between “she” and “did,” as if time itself has to be crossed. “The plums got blight, and had to / Be started over” enacts interruption and renewal. Because no stanza break separates one season from another, the planting feels continuous, almost habitual, a rhythm closer to spade-work than to song. The line lengths are irregular, but many carry an easy spoken cadence; the poem sounds like someone remembering, with small pauses for “Oh, well” and “Last.” The repeated word “Even” marks an extreme: “Even this late in life,” “Even as those old hens looked on amazed.” Lateness becomes not an excuse but a condition for action.
Imagery roots the poem in a particular, unglamorous place. There is the “flat by the road,” the “tool room,” the “rise / Of better ground.” The trees are named with an orchardist’s specificity: apples, pears, cherries, quince, plums, nut trees, mulberries. Failure belongs to this world too—blight ruins the plums, nut trees grow too slowly to offer shade to an old woman. Yet failure never becomes an argument for stopping. The phrase “anyway set / Them out” captures the poem’s stubborn ethic. The woman knows she is “too old to harvest” or to enjoy the shade, but she plants anyway, not for herself.
The poem’s tone refuses to be sentimental. It undercuts moral grandeur with the comic image of “those old hens” looking on “amazed” at this late-life planting. The hens are a small audience of present appetite: they could have eaten mulberries, but they are old too. The woman almost shrugs—“Oh, well”—then orders and plants “once more.” That “Oh, well” is crucial. It is not indifference but an acceptance that some goods arrive after their intended beneficiaries are gone. What begins as one woman’s orchard becomes a model of care that asks nothing back. The final line, “Something to offer folks not yet alive,” widens the frame from an old woman and some hens to the reader and the future reader both. The poem is significant because it turns a small, local act into a dignified idea: true generosity may mean planting trees whose shade you will never sit in. It does not demand heroism, only the patience to work season after season for people who have not yet arrived.