Your Male Anna’s Hummingbird

Given his size, faster than a jet fighter—and that speed 
is scientifically proven—but this guy can cut the engine low, 
hang mid-air purring his idle just one foot
from your nose. Diminutive wings
generating impressive wind, a holding pattern
many recognize as a replica for
the sign of infinity. 
A translucence there. Excessive blur buzz. 
The energy required to keep him eye level
equivalent to a star being born.
His little body almost brumes.

You want all his abilities so blatantly.

When he is unafraid of the whole predator hawk society—
his return meat value so paltry.

When he mocks gravity, that passé reliance—
his adroit upside-down, backward, dead stop 
from pedal-to-the-metal aerials 
stupefying the fat cooing mourning doves
all splayed out atop the stucco’d white wall. 
A Cooper’s hawk’s wiser kill any day.

When he boogies/teases/mirths in and out
of the backyard oleanders with you, his lark.
When he hovers—in patience, elegantly—for your leafy-haired
crunching emergence from the unsafe weeping foliage.

When he siphons your covered back patio
as a hotel suite to sex with a female Anna’s.
His chasing. Their coded, synchronized flitting. Her minxing.
A few gray back-end feathers adrift, 
then infrequent stops to attend to affairs, and 
his lightning sips to the feeder for sugar energy. Seriously.

How fun are you to be with?
You do not want them
to think you are a critical person.
Turns out everyone is looking for some 
version of family. Have your face in a smile.
If only interspecies congress were not 
so derided—as it should be!, given one party
keeps mum on consent—but don’t you
wish you could bullet high 
thirteen vertical stories
for your paramour? Only to divebomb 
face first, seize on a pinhead over asphalt
with all the graceful stop-aplomb of Astaire. 

Days, when he is by himself and flashes in, 
settles on the red plastic perch, positions kneeless 
feet to the feeder, turns and dips
his head, the sharp bill admitted into the feeder’s
slot, the whole body tilts down,
his small green-feathered back to you
and he drinks—
that is his utmost trust.

CYNTHIA SCHWARTZBERG EDLOW

Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow is the author of two poetry collections published by Salmon Poetry; her recent collection Horn Section All Day Every Day is the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award Finalist. Her poetry has won the Red Hen Press, Beullah Rose/Smartish Pace, and Tusculum Review Poetry Awards. Her most recent poems appear in Jet Fuel Review and Plume. Come by: cschwartzbergedlow.blogspot.com.