Tyler Brewington’s “False Spring” is a deeply resonant poem that aches with beauty, heart, grace. The poem hums with images that beg us to view the world in a new way. We follow the poet on his journey as he searches for understanding with care, tenderness, curiosity, wonder, and grief. —Melissa Matthewson
FALSE SPRING
Nothing has less effect on the future than my worry.
Are all of the birds even back?I don’t think we should be seeing crocuses and daffodils this early.
The flowering trees whose names I don’t memorize are flowering.
This is California’s last year of water.
In Idaho thousands of snow geese fell dead from the sky.
Biologists can’t say for sure what happens when bald eagles eat the diseased geese.
If eagles do eat the geese, if they feel like they have a choice.
When I cry it feels like tears come from a vast internal reservoir, but really I
manufacture them on the spot.
I’m trying to be present instead of alive in some imagined future.
With great compassionate detachment I took a vacation.
Every morning at breakfast I reached into a bowl of warm eggs.
Each shell was stamped with a date, that’s how far from home I was, how much on an island.
When I looked across the ridge, a rainbow moved, and in the wind the leaves turned white.
I was in the rainforest learning bamboos, something about a virus coiled inside the snails.
Here is the abandoned mansion, built atop a river, that once had a window in the floor.
Somebody said, Come inside and look at the river.
Here, the estate a movie star rents when he comes to wait for aliens.
No abductions or visitations in my lifetime, says the tour guide.
But then he was away at college for four years, wrestling.
The virus inside the snails came from China and it kills the native iguanas who eat the snails.
Those of us who had been touching one took our hands away from the shell.
Smells, the way the wind felt: two things that can never be approximated.
Everything you love is dangerous, as anyone who’s ever walked behind a horse will tell you.
Anyone with cheekbones, eye sockets, a skull.
People suffer through no fault of their own.
It bothers me that I can’t remember the names of more kinds of trees.
It’s horrifying to think the plants know best, that everything is happening right on schedule.
Hotter and hotter until one day we’re all trying to go to the river and there’s no more river.
I was traveling with that good kind of contact solution.
All night long it mimicked the chemistry of my body asleep.
Home was any puddle I put my eyes in.