The title already turns on a quiet pun: what to do with “leaves” if one cannot “leave” them. Risa Bear begins with a gardener’s autumn question and answers it twice—first as restraint, then as action. The opening clause reaches across the line break into a small list of trees, “aspen, gum, maple and birch,” and the fallen leaves become “a kind of skirt / To warm and feed fanned roots.” That domestic image, clothing the tree’s base, sets the poem’s tone: decay is not death exactly but nurture, a garment for the living root system. The speaker would prefer to leave the leaves where they fall. When that is impossible, the alternative is not disposal but translation: “gather and / Toss them on a garden.”
From there the poem accumulates material the way a compost pile does. The woman “spreads hers / Over bed and path alike, with straw, with / Dead grass and weeds, barn bedding, the contents / Of kitchen bucket and tumble barrel.” The phrase “bed and path alike” will echo later, as if compost erases the boundary between cultivated and walked-upon ground. The list is homely and specific—not the idealized stuff of nature poetry but kitchen scraps, stable litter, even prunings too small for the iron stove. Nothing is wasted. Every line break enacts a kind of layering: the syntax keeps spilling over, adding one more item, one more handful, as the sentence itself becomes a heap of organic language.
The poem’s free verse has no regular rhyme, but it moves through sound echoes—“leaves” and “leave,” “birch” and “skirt,” “straw” and “stills”—that hold the lines together like root fibers. The rhythm is conversational yet unhurried, full of enjambment. That forward motion slows in the middle stanza, where the agent changes from the woman to the worms. “This is for worms and all their small companions / Heaving aside the earth of path and bed alike, / Leveling and loosening, making untilled tilth.” The word “heaving” gives the underworld real muscular force. These creatures do the true gardening, turning compacted soil into “untilled tilth”—a phrase that joins human labor and wild process. “Tilth” is an old word for cultivated soil, but the poem calls it “untilled,” as if the best culture is the one that least disturbs.
Then the poem opens into a visionary close: “Evening comes and she stills, listening / As the city of humus thrums toward spring.” The “city” is surprising and exact—compost is not empty dirt but a dense, populous place, and “thrums” makes its slow decomposition audible, even musical. The woman’s work is done, or rather handed over to billions of unseen lives. She becomes a listener rather than a doer. That shift is crucial: the poem values attention as much as action.
The final sentence turns inward, with a confession: “Very likely it’s best to interfere not / Even this much in things, she tells herself, yet / She’s always loved to tell her children: eat.” The doubled “not / Even” is awkward on purpose, a mind hesitating. She suspects the ideal is noninterference—leave the leaves alone entirely. But the counter-impulse is maternal, visceral, older than argument. The imperative “eat” is the poem’s shortest, most direct sentence. It transforms the meditation on compost into a family scene: feeding the soil and feeding children become versions of the same love. What looks like interference is also invitation—offering the earth something to consume so that it may feed the next growth.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet refusal to separate human need from ecological health. It does not scold or instruct. It watches one woman move through the small daily ritual of returning things to the ground, questions the very effort, and then answers with a word that is both command and blessing. In that short final line, compost becomes kinship: the leaves, the worms, the children, and the soil all share the same loop of feeding and being fed.