Risa Bear’s “Decembering” hangs in the gap between the end of the growing year and the first hard cold, finding meaning in a few stubborn green apples. The title turns the month into an ongoing action: the world is being Decembered—stripped, chilled, yet still holding on. A woman lifts the last Granny Smiths from a bare tree, and the poem honors her tenderness toward fruit her guests would pass over for something waxed. At its heart, the poem is about the patient, unnoticed generosity of living things—and the generosity of paying close attention to them.
The poem moves in loose, unrhymed free verse, with neither fixed meter nor rhyme, but it finds music in alliteration and assonance; its line breaks create small hesitations that mimic a cold day’s careful work. The opening enjambment, “she / Loves,” leaves the woman briefly alone at the line’s edge before her feeling reaches the next line, as if affection itself has to stretch across the cold. The tree is described as “shivered,” a word that makes the bare branches seem both cold and alive; the apples “cling” to it though the “leaves” are “long gone.” Around them, the world has retreated into domestic survival: the hens have “left off / Trusting the sky to toss them sugar” and peck at feed from a “styrene bin.” The soft s and t sounds in “storebought,” “styrene,” and “sugar” quietly set the man-made against the tree’s stubborn natural sweetness.
The poem’s central image is bodily and intimate: the woman lifts the apples “as if they were / Each one of her own breasts, tenderly / Filling her small basket.” The simile does not make the apples precious in a decorative way; it makes them vulnerable, soft-skinned, tied to the body’s ripeness and care. In the kitchen, they “sit shyly waiting their turn,” while “nuts and citrus / Talk among themselves in distant tongues.” The imported foods are loud with elsewhere; the apples are quiet and local. Her hands “make outland meals, / Even finding work for lemon skins,” suggesting a frugality that sees use in what others discard.
Yet the poem does not pretend the apples are admired. “Granny Smiths are not much favored,” and festive guests reach for “waxed” fruit, preferring shine to the living tree. The word “waxed” carries the whole idea of commercial polish—bright, sealed, forgettable. The tree, meanwhile, is “struggling / Night and day to keep for them fresh joy,” as if the act of bearing fruit were an unthanked gift. The woman “cannot blame” the guests because the shy apples “do their best in pie”; this is not a poem of bitterness, but of clear-eyed accommodation and quiet loyalty.
The ending turns leftover fruit into a small feast. “Moonlight limns the fruit she did not pick,” and the verb “limns” gives the unpicked “green globes” the dignity of being drawn in light. They remain “at large,” like escaped treasures, and by morning they become a “Holiday for those that cannot buy.” Squirrels and towhees inherit what human guests ignored. That final shift matters: the tree’s unmarketable gift still finds its receivers. “Decembering” is significant because it makes a homestead moment into an ethic—the shy, the wrinkled, the unwaxed, and the overlooked are still capable of nourishing someone, if only we leave room for them to be seen.