The floor, unfortunately, was phosphorus, so he had to pick his steps
with care. But at last he came to a French window, which he opened, and
sprang to a passing star. Star, not car. He was a poet, and that is what
young poets do.
He had a pleasant physiognomy, as young men go. Unformed, of
course--perhaps twenty minutes late and the hall only two-thirds full.
But he was no longer young enough to hang his hat on the gas. He was
from the East via Honey Dew, Idaho, but he had long resided with an aunt
in Nebraska and so was a strong Acutist. He wore gray shirts and a lemon
tie. At Harvard--he went to Harvard--he had opened his bean with
considerable difficulty and crushed in a ripe strawberry of temperament.
So that he could never stop himself when he beheld a passing star.
The motion was full, with significant curves. It made him a little
air-sick at first, but he preferred air-sickness. He made no compromise
with the public taste for pedestrianism. After a few days that quickly
ceased to be solar, he was rewarded. He came to Asphodelia, a suburb of
Venus on the main line.
In Asphodelia the poets travel on all-fours, kick their heels toward
Mercury, and utter startling cries. In Asphodelia a banker lives in the
menagerie, and they feed mathematical instructors through a hole in the
wall. This new participant had too much of the stern blood of the
Puritan in his rustproof veins to kick more than one heel at a time, but
when he observed a gamboling Asphodelian of seventy years he felt a
little wishful, and permitted himself a trifling ululation. The local
cheer-leader heard him and knew him at once for a Harvard Acutist, and
there was joy in Asphodelia.
A year or so sufficed him. He grew tired of sleeping in the branches of
the cocoanut tree, and the river of green ink wearied him. So when the
next star swung around he slipped away from his pink duenna and crept
into the lattice-work to steal his passage home.
Thought slid from him like an oscillant leaf. He hung there lonely, in
his Reis underwear, aching in the void.
He alighted in the harbor of Rio. When he trans-shipped to New York in
ordinary ways, he prepared his Yonkers uncle, and he was met in undue
course on Front Street.
"My boy," said his uncle, "what do you want me to do for you? Speak the
word. You have been gone so long, and you were given up for lost."
"Only one thing do I want," confessed the former Acutist.
"And what might that be?" the uncle more circumspectly inquired.
"Take me at once to the great simple embrace of wholesome Coney Island."
So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped
from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.
And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not
leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty?
[3] Inscribed to the _Little Review_