Three couplets, no capital letters, no punctuation, and Dave Bonta still manages a claim as big as it gets: without the person I love, I do not exist. The poem opens with its plainest statement, "not seeing her whom I love / I am nothing", and then uses the rest of its short length to find an image big enough, or strange enough, to hold that nothing.
The first couplet is built on absence. "Not seeing" is a negative phrase, so the beloved is defined only by what is missing. We learn nothing about her hair, her voice or her name, and the title, "Apart", does the same thing by naming the gap rather than the people on either side of it. The word "whom" is also worth noticing. In a poem this bare and lowercase, it sounds formal and slightly old-fashioned, like a vow or an old love lyric. The next line then flattens that dignity: "I am nothing" is three blunt words with no decoration.
The second couplet has no verb of its own, so "a great cry / grown in the spring" hangs from "nothing" like an appositive. The speaker, emptied out, is remade as a sound. That is the poem's paradox: he is nothing, and he is also enormous. The verb "grown" is the surprise, because we normally grow plants, not cries. The word borrows from gardening, and "in the spring" supports it, since spring is the season when everything outside is sprouting and calling. The speaker's grief grows alongside the world's renewal, which makes the contrast sharper. "Spring" might also suggest a source of water, something welling up from underground, though that is a possible reading rather than a certain one. The sounds help too. "Great cry grown" packs hard g and cr sounds into a few syllables, so the line seems to catch in the throat, and "spring" ends on an *ng* that rings on.
Then comes the leap that gives the poem its character: "all the ham curing / in one little room." After a cry the size of a season, we are shut in a larder or smokehouse with hanging meat. The comic, earthy jolt is deliberate. The image also fits the feeling in several ways. Curing is slow, and it works by time and by deprivation: salt and air draw the moisture out, and what remains is preserved and more concentrated in flavour. Absence, the poem seems to suggest, does not end the love but keeps it and intensifies it. "Curing" may also carry a pun on healing, but nothing here is healed; it is only kept. And "all" the ham crowded into "one little room" echoes the "great cry" now squeezed into a small space. We have moved from open air to enclosure, and from sound to smell, as if the feeling that could fill the spring has been shut indoors with the speaker.
The form supports this slow tightening. Nothing rhymes, and the lines are short, between three and six syllables. The longest is the first, and the lines grow quieter and heavier, ending on the closed, humming vowel of "room." The last verb, "curing", is a present participle, so the process is still going on. With no full stop, the poem ends in the middle of waiting rather than at a resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to explain itself. It never says how a cry and a ham are connected. It sets the abstract confession, the natural image and the domestic image side by side and leaves the reader to feel the link. Because the last image is so ordinary, even a little funny, the poem avoids self-pity. The speaker looks at his own misery with a wry, practical eye and finds it in the pantry. For a student, the lesson is that a handful of plain words, carefully placed, can make an emotion physical: not a grand declaration of sorrow, but something you can almost smell.