This week’s poem, Jim Krosschell’s “Bird Baiting,” zooms in on a particularly zoom-y bird at the speaker’s feeder. I love this poem’s darting, swerving rhythms, and the thrilling exhilaration the speaker finds in the tiny creature’s nearness.

Krosschell divides his life into three parts: growing up for 29 years, working in science publishing for 29 years, and now writing in Northport, Maine, and Newton, Massachusetts. His work has been published in some 70 journals. His book “Owls Head Revisited” was published by North Country Press, and his essay collection “One Man’s Maine” won a 2018 Maine Literary Award.

Bird Baiting
By Jim Krosschell

It doesn’t really hum, more a buzz,
it cannot be a bird, more like a bee,

mis-named impossibility, then, this
jewel flying backwards that startles

me each time it bombs the red glass
flower, and then stops, hovers, sips

liquid donuts from plastic petals, all
of which I’ve furnished so I can be

interrupted from ennui and reverie
and hijack its wildly beating heart.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Bird Baiting,” copyright 2023 by Jim Krosschell, appears by permission of the author.

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