The Ambiance of the Professor

The professor was lost. The reason for it was something he couldn’t find.
“But,” as he put it, “that’s wholly irrelevant if you’re out of your mind.”

He survived on hazelnuts and poisonous blue roots.
At six he dined on candy cane and bamboo shoots.

He slicked his hair with beeswax and smoked water in his pipe.
“Mmm,” he murmured. “The water here is good, and it’s ripe.”

His entire time in the woods he was very careful to be polite.
He got out a hose and washed his toes every nineteenth night.

He missed his granddaughter, so he stopped by the post office and sent her a letter.
“I should’ve put it in the creek,” he said calmly and sadly. “That would’ve been better.”

He dug a piano from under the leaves, and gracefully lulled out a song,
Lost and Alone as Sand in Space, but the words, as usual, came out wrong:

A rock sinks in the sleek black sea, never to return.
The fire in my heart’s so loud I can hear it burn.

I’ll never see you again, never see you again, never, never, I cry.
The thought of you is my reason for living, but it makes me die.

The professor climbed trees; he jumped into streams; he thrashed around in the brush.
And when he missed her so bad he was blind, he unlost with a twitch and a rush.