In Risa Bear’s “See It Through,” an orchard becomes a quiet moral test. The opening line states a duty — “One should not have an orchard and / Not care for it” — and the poem follows a woman as she leaves a thrifted, “pre-softened” chair and a house she could keep “warm or cool as she might wish” for “too much sun or too much rain.” Care here is not a gentle tending from an easy position. She “lurches” into work, the tools have gathered “dust and webs,” and the jobs have “skipped two years at least.” The central idea is that genuine care is an awkward, embodied, even painful practice, and that its reward must be earned through direct effort rather than delegated away.
The poem’s construction mimes that effort. Its free-verse lines are unrhymed and irregular, often ending on small connective words — “from,” “an,” “Each” — so the reader, like the woman, keeps being pulled forward before arriving anywhere settled. Semicolons and clauses strain across line breaks, especially in the passage that moves from the “kind roof of a porch she’d built” to the tools now “marks of a new will to / Neglect.” The break after “to” gives the abstract word “Neglect” an almost active presence. Even the sentence rhythms have an unsteady, lurching quality, and the sounds are similarly rough-edged: the sibilance of “vines, tall weeds, watersprouts, suckers” hisses like unruliness being cut away, while “lopper and saw” makes a blunt pair. These choices keep the verse from sounding like polished pastoral verse; it feels like work doing itself.
Imagery turns practical and a little fierce. The woman grips “lopper and saw” and moves among apple, quince, pear, plum, cherry. The names of the trees promise sweetness and variety, but the verbs are all about cutting back excess. The work is not decorative: she “designates branches for her stove,” converting the orchard’s waste into future warmth. As the morning heats, she strips off hat, jacket, shirt, gloves, until her “Old skin” is “offered to thorns, thistles, / Rough bark.” That word “offered” matters. It transforms exposure into a choice — a small sacrifice of comfort and safety. The adjective “Old” also carries a double sense: the body that meets the thorns is aging and vulnerable, and the skin may be the husk of an earlier self she is willing to shed. Even the aside “Really she’d meant to hire it done” is telling. It admits the very wish to escape that the poem quietly resists.
Around that aside, the poem sketches a believable economics. She might have paid the neighbors’ children, who are “short on cash,” to do the pruning. Instead she works alone and calls the impulse “Habit,” repeating the word as if testing whether habit is strong enough. But habit is not the deepest reason. The clincher comes in the poem’s own quiet wisdom: “the way / Apples come best that see right sun, / Ripe enough to pay her for some pains.” Here “see” gathers meanings. Apples must “see right sun” to ripen fully; she must “see it through” to completion. Seeing becomes both exposure to light and sustained attention. The final line — “Do a thing yourself to see it through” — is a proverb, but it does not arrive as a sticker message. The poem has already shown the scrapes, sweat, and stubbornness that make the proverb credible.
What makes “See It Through” significant is its refusal of convenience. It does not pretend that the right mood or the right tools will make care easy; it names dust, webs, weeds, thorns, and old skin. Yet it also insists that facing those discomforts can produce something ripe. The orchard is not merely a plot of trees; it becomes any demanding good — a relationship, a craft, a home — that only pays back the hands that stay with it. Bear’s speaker, a woman unnamed and therefore available as a kind of ordinary hero, earns her closing advice through bodily work. That is why the poem feels less like instruction than like a record of a choice: to meet neglect, not with shame, but with the slow courage of showing up.