Holding a licked finger up to feel which way the wind blows is a homely, low-tech way of reading the air. It needs no instruments and no expertise. Christine La Belle builds a whole poem of waiting around that gesture, in thirteen words and four lines. Its title is just three asterisks, so the first line has to do the work of a title. The central idea is the gap between certainty and evidence. The speaker states that someone will come, yet cannot stop checking for signs.
The opening line is confident: "you will come today." It says "will", not "may" or "I hope", and its plain, mostly one-syllable words sound like something said under the breath, half prediction and half mantra. There is no capital letter and no punctuation, so the line seems to come mid-thought, as if the waiting began long before the poem did. The poem never says who "you" is. A lover, a friend, a child, a parent are all possible, and the poem seems content to leave that open.
The line break that follows is where the poem turns. After "today" comes a line holding one word, "tomorrow", and the white space between them can be read as a day passing. Because nothing is punctuated, "tomorrow" works two ways. It can be a correction, as though the speaker revises the deadline: today, no, tomorrow. Or it can begin the next sentence: "tomorrow I hold a wet finger / to the wind." In the first reading the arrival retreats. In the second the waiting becomes a routine that carries on into the next day. The poem does not choose, and both readings leave the person not yet there. The three-syllable "tomorrow" is also the slowest, most drawn-out sound in the poem, and its trailing "-row" sounds a little like a sigh.
The last two lines turn from the person who is expected to the person who waits. "I" appears only here, and the verb is "hold", not "raise" or "lift". It suggests staying still and keeping at something. The wet finger is a good choice of image. Moisture makes skin more sensitive to the cold of moving air, so the wet side of the finger tells you where the wind is coming from. The speaker is trying to detect a direction, and it is easy to infer that they hope the wind, or at least a change in it, will bring the expected person nearer. The gesture is also slightly comic and slightly exposed, since it means standing outdoors with one finger in the air. That small vulnerability keeps the poem from sounding grand. The speaker declared that "you will come" and can only back it up with a damp fingertip.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the sound is carefully managed. The lines run five, three, six and three syllables, so they swell and shrink like breath. The short "i" in "will", "finger" and "wind" links the first and last lines across the poem, and "wet", "will" and "wind" share a "w" that gives the ending a soft, airy feel. The final word, "wind", is a single stressed syllable, and there is no full stop after it. The poem simply stops, and no one has arrived. The form enacts the waiting by refusing to resolve.
The poem is worth reading because it trusts one image to carry a whole emotional situation. It does not explain the longing or say who is late. It gives us a body, a gesture and a changing sky, and lets us supply the rest from our own experience of waiting. The poem sits between knowing and sensing. The speaker claims to know, "you will come", yet behaves like someone who only hopes, testing the air for proof. That is true of a great deal of waiting, which is part faith and part watching for signs, and the poem shows it in a very small space.