Overnight Success
A Poem by Jim Krosschell
As tiny as a seed of wheat, it must have launched itself into the abyss between my chair and the railing of the deck, ropes trailing (like me jumping off the far tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and swooping all the way to Marin), and then it rests all day on the slightest of gossamer threads, every breeze rattling it like a hurricane. In the morning I see it’s completed the web - anchored in seven places, artful concentric circles of death (how easy it is to make something perfect) and by noon its reward is a gnat. Oh, spin me too an airship of silk, let the wind blow me far. Fasten me onto a headland of grit, let the work of making a poem begin. Yet no matter how hard a human can work, concocting corrections late into night, poems will never be perfect. We send them out anyway, don’t we.
Jim Krosschell’s (he/him) poems and essays have appeared in some 80 journals, and he has published two essay collections: One Man's Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Northport, ME and Newton, MA, and is Board President of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
