Usefulness, in Risa Bear’s “How She Knows,” is not a résumé or a public identity. It is quiet, seasonal, and entangled with other creatures. The poem asks how a woman alone can know her life still matters, and answers through a series of small, deliberate acts: breaking old cornstalks, feeding hens, protecting sleeping wasp queens, carrying soiled barn water to trees. The central idea is that worth can be measured in reciprocity—what one gives back to a place and its living things. The title’s “knows” belongs not to logic but to daily practice; she knows by doing.
The poem is free verse, shaped more by syntax and line breaks than by meter or rhyme. Its first line ends with a colon, turning the whole poem into an explanation: how she knows. Enjambment often makes the reader pause where the worker pauses. The old cornstalks “must be shattered right / Where they stood green,” the line breaking after “right” so that the act lands precisely. Later, she values rich mulch “almost / To distraction,” the break isolating “almost” to suggest both obsession and restraint. The rhythm is unhurried, like the work itself: mucking out a barn, checking a lilac, walking to trees with a bucket. There is no rhyme, but sound-patterning holds the lines together—the repeated s’s in “sacs of eggs suspended” make the waiting feel hushed and fragile.
Imagery works by specificity. The plants are named not as decorative flowers but as useful, weedy things: deadnettles, nipplewort, kale, comfrey. That naming is a kind of respect; it knows what hens need. The wasp queens sleeping in the woodpile are vivid and slightly frightening: her heart “skips a beat” when she sees each one, yet she chooses to care for their rest because they do her garden good. The image refuses easy sentiment. Care here is not always comfortable; it coexists with fear and is still offered. Likewise, the cobwebs under the beams contain “sacs of eggs suspended in each, waiting / End of winter, not to be disturbed.” The future lives in those sacs, and her slowness is a form of protection. The poem’s world is full of waiting: worms in darkness, hens, hummingbirds checking the lilac for a nectar bottle, unborn wasps. She moves inside that waiting without forcing it.
Key words accumulate into an ethic. “Useless” opens the poem and “asset” nearly closes it, turning a financial word into a moral one. In between, she serves all “equitably”; the barn water is carried to trees as “something to stave off drought.” That word matters—not every creature is loved equally, but each is given what it needs. The wasps are not petted; they are left safe. The hens are fed. The trees drink. Her “friends,” in the final line, expands beyond human society. In her solitude, friendship is not absent; it is distributed among worms, hens, hummingbirds, wasps, and trees.
What makes the poem significant is the way it refuses both self-pity and grand heroism. There is no audience applauding her labor, no harvest festival. The speaker earns the right to call herself an asset not through achievement but through attention. That is a quietly radical idea: a life can be justified by its small acts of maintenance, by keeping other lives possible through winter into spring. The poem’s music and images are modest, but they ask a large question—what is a human being for?—and answer with mulch, barn water, and a careful hand left over a sleeping wasp.