In Risa Bear’s “Sixes,” a woman sets out to fight bindweed among cabbages, peas, borage, arugula, potatoes, and raspberries. The verb “fight” gives the errand a small heroic shape, but the real battle quickly turns inward. The bindweed, the genuinely stubborn enemy, is set aside when she notices thistles, “more / easily removed,” and gives her hour to the easier satisfaction. The poem’s central idea grows from that swerve: attention drifts toward what can be quickly accomplished, yet the body’s limits and the world’s small dramas can interrupt that drift and turn avoidance into contemplation.
Most of the poem runs on six-syllable lines, a form the title announces. Those short units create a clipped, unhurried rhythm, like a gardener moving down a row, stopping, straightening up. Bear keeps many lines enjambed: “Distracted by / thistles,” “more / easily removed,” “out / of breath.” The line breaks create tiny delays, as though the woman is pausing between efforts or reconsidering the work. The six-count is not rigid. As she sinks into the chair and watches “two goldfinches / having it out,” the line stretches and then contracts, as if the poem itself has stopped counting along with her. Form imitates attention: orderly when the task is in mind, looser when the eyes follow birds.
The imagery stays close to the ground and the body. Bindweed and thistles are not scenery but recurring garden foes, one twining and hard to uproot, the other easier to remove and therefore tempting. The list of vegetables and herbs—cabbages, peas, borage, arugula, potatoes, raspberries—sounds like a gardener’s inventory, exact and sensuous. Against that green abundance, the “cracked resin chair” and the speaker’s “ponderously” eased body, “out of breath,” introduce wear. The chair is cracked as a body can be stiff; the hour of work is enough to tire her. No triumph over the bindweed is claimed. Rest arrives, and with it the chance to observe.
The goldfinches on the mossy fence post become the poem’s mirror. Their quarrel is described with the colloquial “having it out,” echoing “fight” but shrinking it to a bright, winged squabble on a weathered post. The woman no longer fights; she watches. The moss softens the boundary between garden and wild, effort and stillness. The subject shifts from weeding to attention itself: what happens when a person stops doing one thing and becomes present to another.
The ending turns that shift into an ars poetica. “What is not said in six / syllables is silence.” That sentence is itself split into two six-syllable lines, so the statement performs its constraint. The poem has been speaking in sixes all along, and now it names what the form cannot carry. The woman’s unfinished labor, her breath, the garden after she leaves the chair, the fate of the bindweed—all remain offstage. That silence is not emptiness; it is the unspoken margin around the chosen words. In a poem this compact, the ordinary moment gains dignity precisely because so much is left out.
What makes “Sixes” significant is the way it joins a small, almost comic domestic scene to a serious reflection on limitation. The speaker accomplishes less than she intended, but the poem turns the lesser task into honesty. The six-syllable line, like the hour of easy weeding, is a discipline that cannot encompass everything. What remains is silence, and in Bear’s hands that silence feels less like failure than like room to breathe, watch, and let the goldfinches have their noisy small say.