Risa Bear’s “Sometimes” begins not in a dramatic crisis but in a prediction: “this is what you’ll come to, picking about / in earth.” The second-person address makes the reader an imagined gardener, bent over morning glory roots “like long white worms.” That simile quietly links the living garden to the grave worm, and the poem’s unease grows from there. What starts as ordinary weeding becomes an encounter with something that cannot be named, even while the speaker is surrounded by a beloved, thriving homestead.
The first stanza is built as one accumulating sentence. After the claim that the gardener will become “distant and glum,” with wrists “caked in clay,” the poem lists the things that ought to comfort: the “small red barn,” irises, bamboo, oak and ash, “three brave maples rattling in the breeze,” the house “bracketed in lilacs, breathing smoke,” woodshed, mint and parsley, geese, ducks, pear trees in bloom. The list is rich with color, warmth, and new life. There is no steady rhyme scheme; the momentum comes instead from syntactic accumulation, the repeated possessive “your,” and consonantal phrases such as “bit by troweled bit” that slow the reader like a spade turning. Yet the key word arrives before the list, almost swallowed: “not.” These possessions and living things, the syntax says, will not “rid you of the thought of what this is / that you are digging.” By delaying the verb “will rid” until after the long catalogue, Bear lets the beauty gather force and then shows its limit.
The poem’s movement mirrors the mood it describes. The title “Sometimes” prevents the feeling from becoming totalizing, and the second stanza offers a small turn: “Assuming the sun will come out, which now / it does, things won’t seem quite that bad.” The tone is nearly conversational, even wry. But the relief is only partial. The gardener still walks “stooped, with furrowed / brow,” the word “furrowed” quietly continuing the imagery of earth and plowing into the body. The “late cold lunch” is a domestic detail that has lost its comfort; the house no longer seems to “breathe smoke” as a sign of warmth. The final image refuses explanation: there are “no words / to share what it was the cold ground / said to your hands just now.” That paradox—ground speaking, but without words—is the poem’s real subject.
What makes “Sometimes” significant is its willingness to leave the central thought unnamed. It does not turn the garden into a symbol that can be decoded; it presents a felt knowledge that is tactile and immediate, yet resists speech. The repeated “your” throughout the first stanza creates intimacy and ownership, but ownership cannot protect the speaker from the ground’s message. The poem honors ordinary labor as a site of real perception, while also admitting that the most profound moments may arrive as a cold silence. In doing so, it gives dignity to an experience many readers will recognize: a mood that comes over the body during simple work, a sense that the ground knows something, and that no amount of beauty or property can translate it into language.