Two short sentences, a title, and already a puzzle: who exactly is the "Bird lover"? The poem names no speaker and no bird. It gives us only a wolf, a wing and a mind. The title therefore works like a small trap. We expect a gentle birdwatcher, and the poem hands us a predator. The most unsettling reading is that the wolf is the bird lover, because it loves in the only way a wolf can, by consuming.
The first couplet turns on the word "sorry." "how sorry is the wolf" can be read as a real question about remorse: how much regret does a wolf feel? It can also be read as an exclamation of pity, in the old sense of sorry as wretched or pathetic: what a sorry creature. The missing question mark keeps both options open. The line "to eat a wing" then supplies the cause of the sorrow, and the choice of object matters. The wolf doesn't eat the bird, only a wing, the part that makes a bird a bird, the part that lifts it out of reach. Taking the wing as a stand-in for the whole creature, the image suggests that what the wolf destroys is exactly what it must have admired. That is how love and appetite get tangled together.
The second couplet moves from animal to idea. "a wolf hard as the mind / to do something with" is a compressed, slightly twisted comparison. The simplest paraphrase is that this wolf is as hard to deal with as the mind is. The line break makes the sentence wobble, though. "hard as the mind" could also hint at hardness in the sense of stubbornness or cold resistance, as if the mind were a stone. So the wolf and the mind are folded into one another. The poem seems to be saying that the mind has a wolf in it: an instinct that pounces, takes things apart and swallows them, and that we cannot easily tame, redirect or put to use. Judging by the title, one possible reading is that the mind's way of loving a bird, by naming it, picking at it and turning it into thought, is itself a kind of eating. The poem never says this outright, and its silence is part of its force.
Its construction is minimal and deliberate. Everything is lowercase, and there is no punctuation at all, so the sentences float without clear boundaries, which suits a poem about a mind that won't be managed. The couplets are close in length, with six syllables followed by four in the first and six followed by five in the second. The second couplet slightly stretches the first, as though the thought were growing heavier. There is no rhyme, but the sounds still bind the poem together. "Wolf" appears in both couplets, once at the end of a line and once near the start of another, and the w of "wolf" returns in "wing" and again in the last word, "with." That echo quietly links the predator, its prey and the unresolved ending.
That ending is the poem's cleverest move. "with" is a preposition, a word that expects an object, and the poem stops before supplying one. We are left with "to do something with" and nothing to do it with, or nothing to do about it. The grammar reproduces the helplessness the lines describe: the thought reaches for a resolution and finds only a hanging word. The idiom "do something with" is also pleasingly ordinary, almost shrugging, set against the savage image of the wolf. That plain, offhand register makes the idea feel more disturbing, not less.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so few words. In eleven or so lines' worth of meaning it holds a joke, an ethical question and a small theory of consciousness. It doesn't tell us whether the wolf is guilty or merely pitiable, and it won't tell us whether the mind is something to fear. Instead it leaves us holding that last dangling "with," which is a good description of how it feels to love something and not know what to do with the wanting.