Thrilling Little Darling

The whole anecdote—forty-plus

Lines of prosaic vers libre

Re a scene in a theater

Waiting for a movie to start—

Is built around the whimsical

Metaphor of a woman’s hand

As the beak of a hungry bird,

Tugging and twirling her own hair,

The metaphor and anecdote

Around the metaphor, alike,

Not making any point at all,

Not so much as a cri de coeur,

The whole text to get to one phrase,

Square in its penultimate line—

The finger-billed whimbrel—that just

Tickled the poor poet to death.