"Have we ever done anything else?" The question sounds like a weary joke, but it also asks what a life amounts to once its work is taken away. Mary F. C. Pratt's poem follows one final harvest on an orchard. The title and a few clues, "where the house will be" and "their last year with roots, with leaves," suggest the land is about to be built on. The speaker never says she is grieving. She lists chores, apple names and birds, and the loss shows through the details. The central idea is that farewell is least bearable when it is spoken aloud, so the poem lets habit carry the feeling.
The opening stanza gives the whole poem in miniature. A mouse has nested in the cooler, and the person addressed as "you" lifts the mother "by her tail / with her babies clinging" and carries her "safe to the long grass." The parenthetical "never mind the traps we always set" admits the contradiction: these people kill mice and spare this one. That small inconsistency feels human rather than sentimental. The detail also carries an irony. The mother is rescued into long grass, but the land around her is not being rescued.
The second stanza is built from routine. "Boxes sorted, stacked on the wagon" is a clipped sentence with no one performing it, as if the work has long since become automatic. The "usual jokes" have worn smooth, and "how many times?" could be about the harvests or about the jokes themselves. The warning "Don't count, you'll be sorry" is the poem's most revealing line. The speakers are avoiding the tally of lasts, yet the poem is itself that tally. "Once more, the tractor smell" shows memory arriving through the nose before the mind.
Then comes a catalogue: "Akane, HoneyCrisp, / Keepsake, Jonagold." These are real apple varieties, and the names read almost like a roll call. "Keepsake" happens to name what the poem is doing, which is keeping what can't be kept. By listing what is gone, "No MacIntosh now. / No Empire, Cortland," the speaker defines the orchard by its distinctiveness: "Nothing common." The trees are failing, with their "first bad crop / of scab," and are "unpruned, unmowed." The prefix repeated in those two words shows neglect, and the neglect seems deliberate, a way of letting go. The stanza ends on "their last year with roots, with leaves." The doubled "with" makes the trees' remaining life sound like an inventory, and "roots" hints at what will be pulled up.
The final stanza turns to the body and the sky. The "old ache across the shoulders" is physical, but it is also the ache of long habit. The ladder "clanging every time / you lift it, every time you change" uses repetition to imitate the rhythm of the work. "Change" is ambiguous. It could mean moving the ladder to the next tree, or it could point at the larger change the poem circles. The poem then ends without a verb: "Burst of goldfinches, first snowgeese, / sunlight on the raven's wing." The word "first" in "first snowgeese" answers the earlier "last." Seasons keep turning, and the speaker's attention, still sharp after all these years, ends on a list of things worth noticing.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and short, speech-like lines. Its energy comes from fragments and colons: "Our usual jokes: how many times?", "Then apples again:", "Those trees with their first bad crop / of scab:". The colons make the poem move by pointing at things instead of explaining them. The dash after "clinging" interrupts the mouse rescue the way a thought interrupts a task. The sounds are quietly expressive, too, especially in "tall ladder clanging," where the hard consonants ring like metal.
The poem is significant for its restraint. It could have been an elegy full of lament, but it trusts a rescued mouse, a joke too worn to count and a row of apple names to hold the sorrow. A reader who has never picked an apple can still recognize the last time someone does a familiar job, and the way love for a place shows in how closely it is attended to until the end.