Risa Bear’s “Upon Slowly Waking, She” turns the small, private ritual of getting out of bed into a quietly defiant act. The woman at its center does not leap into day; she “rouses from a dream of fear,” her spine “filled with fluids overnight” and her ankles already aching. From the first lines, waking is not relief but a struggle against the body’s accumulated wear and the mind’s residue of nightmare. The poem follows her step by step as she moves from bed to mirror to the outside world, suggesting that ordinary persistence is a kind of courage.
Written in free verse, the unrhymed lines move with the irregular pace of the woman’s body rather than a fixed pattern. The opening movement is halting and tactile. She “crawls” across her beloved, “stumbles round the room,” and slides her feet along the floor as if she must learn the house’s shape again. The floor “creaks with dry rot,” a detail that links the house’s decay to her own stiffness. The objects she encounters—“bloomers, slips, half-slips, girdles, bras, tights, stockings”—are not glamorous; they are the foundations worn close to the skin. The poem calls them “objects that reshape her,” a phrase that catches the ambiguity of dressing: these garments support and constrain, reconstructing a body and a social self from a raw, frightened morning state.
The mirror scene sharpens the poem’s central tension. Feeling “Braille-fingered” for a small room, she finds a place where “men or women are / only men or women” before any observer’s gaze. The light is harsh, and the reflection becomes an internal judge: “Her eye looks deeply through her from the glass; / tells her that her sorrows are contemptible. So?” That single-word question is the poem’s pivot. It does not deny the accusation so much as dismiss its power. Sorrow may be small or unglamorous, but the woman refuses to be shamed by it. The response is not self-celebration; it is the irritable, essential refusal to stop.
That refusal takes shape in what she does not do. “She does not plan to die today, no, nor call in / sick,” the speaker says, holding off the temptation of the “now cold sheets” and the “awful dream.” The double negative is deliberate: it frames her action as a choice against easier forms of retreat. Then the poem undercuts any heroism with a shrug: “Call it what you will, / habit if you like.” What follows is a description of modest order. The living room is “remodeled somehow, despite poverty,” with white walls, a patched fireplace, and a mantel holding “oil lamps and seemly books.” The word “seemly” matters—this is not luxury but decency, a space kept clean and composed through effort. Here she dresses, as if the room itself helps assemble the self that will meet the day.
Outside, the weather offers no encouragement: “darkness, low / clouds, and the rattling of busy downspouts.” She shrugs. The poem then tracks sound and movement through the house with growing momentum. Her heels strike wood, then tile, then concrete as she passes from kitchen to mudroom, and the line breaks quicken into a forward rhythm. “No entropy now stops her,” the speaker states, recasting the earlier decay as a force she can, for a while, outpace. Her coat is stained and her umbrella bent; these are not polished props of success. Yet she gathers them anyway and opens the door.
The final line is striking in its flatness: “She walks out to the world.” No exclamation, no symbol of transformation, only a completed motion. That is the poem’s significance. It does not pretend that morning erases fear or pain, nor that dignity requires perfection. It locates value in the slow sequence by which a body and a self are put back together—through touch, clothing, mirror-lit reckoning, and a movement toward the outside. The woman’s “So?” becomes an answer to every voice that says her sorrow is too small or her efforts too ordinary. The poem insists that the ordinary is enough.