Conrad Aiken: Duval’s Birds

The parrot, screeching, flew out into the darkness,

Circled three times above the upturned faces

With a great whir of brilliant outspread wings,

And then returned to stagger on her finger.

She bowed and smiled, eliciting applause…

The property man hated her dirty birds.

But it had taken years—yes, years—to train them,

To shoulder flags, strike bells by tweaking strings,

Or climb sedately little flights of stairs.

When they were stubborn, she tapped them with a wand,

And her eyes glittered a little under the eyebrows.

The red one flapped and flapped on a swinging wire;

The little white ones winked round yellow eyes.

From Turns and Movies (1916). One of a poem sequence portraying vaudeville acts, and the only one that near-completely avoids sentimentality or melodrama. Aiken was still in limbo between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This poem’s anti-climactic non-resolution seems to indicate how he was trying to work through to a sense of where to go and where not to go.