Spring

Is coming. This is a poem about spring,

which is too much. Everything is too much.

This is a poem about everything.

I ruin everything I touch.

I ruin the jonquils, the daffodils.

I ruin the I love you.

I ruin the blue remembered hills.

The apple-trees vomit blossom. I ruin the morning dew.

Mine is a peculiar badness.

You are reduced to the smell of your hair.

Mine is a peculiar sadness.

You are almost not quite there.

Which is to say, I am terrified.

Meanwhile the grassy goodness, the lengthening day.

It’s not as if you died.

You come closer and closer away.

Tim’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Bravado, Dreamcatcher, Landfall, New Zealand Books, the Listener, North & South, Reconfigurations, Sport, Takahe, Turbine and Best of the Best New Zealand Poems. A couple of poems are forthcoming in New Zealand Books and an anthology of villanelles. His collection, A House on Fire (Steele-Roberts), was published in 2009.

This poem was originally published in Sport 39. I love that this traditional form holds untraditional content. 

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