Someone walks through a spring field gathering whatever it offers, and the speaker, who is watching, slips out of the role of watcher. By the fourth line "I'm with / you in the field," and a moment later the speaker is the field: "mud, or / grass," then something lodged "beneath your nails." The poem is ten lines long, and in that space it turns a quiet observer into a landscape. Its central idea is a paradox of love, or perhaps of haunting. The speaker is as close to the "you" as it is possible to be, packed under the fingernails, and yet is entirely unnoticed. The final question, "do you see me here, or in the air?", is not rhetorical decoration. It is the whole emotional point of the poem.
The title helps explain this. An "apparition" is something that appears without quite being there, and the number 562 suggests the poem belongs to a very long sequence, though that is an inference from the title alone. The speaker certainly behaves like an apparition. The verbs of the first half are strangely passive, as if the speaker has no body to act with: "held fast" by the one who is foraging, while "Bark flakes off me," a detail that quietly changes the speaker from soil and grass into a tree. The self does not stay in one form. It keeps becoming whatever the scene contains.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular beat, which suits a speaker with no fixed shape. Instead, the lines are cut so that the break often interrupts the grammar. "I'm with" stops before "you," so the line ending briefly leaves the speaker alone at the very moment the sentence promises togetherness. "Branches" is stranded at the end of line seven, while the verb "sway" waits on the next line, so the branches seem to hang before they move. Sentences also start and stop in the middle of lines ("it's spring," "held fast. Bark flakes off me. / You pass on"), which gives the poem a hushed, breathless pace, close to someone murmuring observations as they come.
Sound does the work that rhyme usually does. The first half is full of hard, scratching consonants: "streaked," "flakes," "flecked." These words describe surfaces being marked or broken off, and they make the spring feel tactile rather than pretty. Then comes a small cluster of open vowels: "grass," "fast," "pass." The echo runs across three lines and links being buried in the grass, being held, and being left behind. The word "pass" is particularly loaded. A person "passes on" through a field, but the phrase also carries the sense of dying, which fits an apparition. "Satisfied" adds a chill. The foraging "you" takes what is needed and goes, never knowing what was in their hands.
That idea of foraging deserves a closer look. To forage is to search for food, so the field is being treated as something to be taken from. The speaker, by becoming the field, is being quietly consumed. Yet nothing in the tone is bitter. "Branches / sway, flecked by tongues" is ambiguous in an almost erotic way. The tongues might be leaves, flames, or speech, and the poem does not choose. What the line does suggest is a landscape alive with mouths and touch.
The shift near the end is the most surprising. The speaker moves from describing to commanding: "look at my garden's sprawl." The word "my" claims the entire scene, weeds included, and "sprawl" admits that this self is untidy and spread out rather than neat. It is a plea disguised as an invitation. The speaker has dispersed into everything, and the only way to be found is for the beloved to look properly.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little: ten short lines, no rhyme, and a handful of earthy images. It captures a feeling most readers will recognise, that of being everywhere in someone's life yet never quite registered. Because the poem ends on a question, with the "you" still walking and the speaker still scattered, that feeling is left unresolved, and the reader is left looking at the field and wondering what they too have walked past.