Late winter has a psychological weather, and Risa Bear’s “That Time” lives inside it. The poem follows a woman—a gardener or subsistence farmer—during the season when nothing is visibly growing. Her tools are oiled, her beds are ready, but the soil is asleep, and she is left with questions. The central idea is not simply impatience for spring; it is the way identity and purpose can be eroded by waiting. She asks whether she is “even a subsistence woman,” as if the dormant season has taken away the very definition of her life. The poem suggests that readiness is not just a practical state but an existential one, and that the gap between preparation and growth can feel like a threat of being forgotten.
Bear builds that suspended feeling through rhythm and line. The poem is free verse, with irregular stanzas and no fixed rhyme, yet it has a deliberate music. Enjambment keeps thought spilling past the line’s edge: “she wonders / If she’s even a subsistence woman, is / Mistaken in that as so much else.” The break after “is” makes the word dangle, so the reader feels the woman’s uncertainty as a syntactical halting. The stanzas themselves contract and expand—nine lines, eight, five, seven—mirroring a mind that cannot settle. The repeated “Now? Now? Now? Now?” in the second stanza acts like a knock against the seeds’ silence; the word beats four times, urgent and unanswered, before the line admits, “Though she knows they will not move.”
Imagery carries much of the poem’s emotional weight. The opening sets human rest alongside natural rest: her skills are “synchronized / And sympathetic with soil’s sleep,” while lilac and jonquil buds remain “tucked within themselves,” a phrase that makes them sound like children or secrets. The seeds are personified as silent bargainers; her hands “enter into bargains with their quietude,” as if touching the packets might coax an answer. The concrete details—peas, beets, radishes “nearest the house”—ground the poem in a specific garden, and the remembered smell of radishes “lifted, bitten” brings a flash of future bodily pleasure into the cold present. Against that, the tools wait “in their ranks, sharpened, / Oiled,” like soldiers whose discipline has become useless. Clouds pass “low, lightless, sulking,” giving the sky a mood rather than a description.
Key words create a pressure between emptiness and action. “Nothing,” “rest,” “quietude,” “blank,” and “forgetfulness” form one current; “bargains,” “asks,” “done,” “heaps heaped” form another. The poem is full of completed work—the arbor, fences, orchard, heaps—yet the speaker still asks, “Is there nothing that can be done?” The question is rhetorical and almost comic in its repetition, “for the hundredth time,” but it points to real pain: all her competence cannot make the earth wake. The title’s phrase, “That Time,” is deliberately indefinite, as if this blank stretch is too well known to need naming.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to romanticize patience. Many poems about spring celebrate renewal; this one stays in the difficult interval before renewal arrives. The final image is especially uneasy: she wants “this blank month” to turn “a little / Nearer sun, before her plot of earth / Grazes on forgetfulness too soon.” The phrase “grazes on forgetfulness” turns the ground into a hungry animal, as if neglect were a pasture it could wander into. The poem thus links the woman’s interior state to the land’s condition—if she does not act, or if the season does not turn, both may lapse into forgetting. That quiet fear gives the poem its stake: waiting is not empty time but a struggle to remain someone while the world withholds its green.