I heard a flaming noise that screamed-- "Man, panting, crushed, must be redeemed! Man! All the crowd of him! Quiet or loud of him! Men! Raging souls of them! Heaps of them, shoals of them! Hurtling impassioned through fiery-tongued rapture! Leaping for glories all avid to capture Bounteous æons of star-beating bliss!" I heard a voice cry, and I'm sure it said this: Though the cook said the noise was a tree and a bird ... _But I heard! Gods, I heard!_ _Conrad Aiken_ (Creeping mysteriously out of the twilight, draped in a complex.) THE CHARNEL BIRD Forslin murmurs a melodious impropriety Musing on birds and women dead æons ago.... Was he not, once, this fowl, a gay bird in society? Can any one tell? ... After an evening out, who can know? Perhaps Cleopatra, lush in her inadequate wrappings, Lifted him once to her tatbebs.... Perhaps Helen of Troy Found him more live than her Paris ... a bird among dead ones.... Perhaps Semiramis ... once ... in a pink unnamable joy * * * [Illustration] I tie my shoes politely, a salute to this bird in his pear-tree; ... What is a pear-tree, after all.... What is a bird? What is a shoe, or a Forslin, or even a Senlin? What is ... a what? ... Is there any one who has heard? ... What is it crawls from the kiss-thickened, Freudian darkness, Amorous, catlike ... Ah, can it be a cat? I would so much rather it had been a scarlet harlot, There is so much more genuine poetry in that.... (Note by the Collator: It was, in fact, Fluffums, the Angora cat belonging to the Jenkinses on the corner; and the disappointment was too much for Mr. Aiken, who fainted away, and had to be taken back to Boston before completing his poem, which he had intended to fill an entire book.) _Mary Carolyn Davies_ (Impetuously, with a floppy hat.) A YOUNG GIRL TO A YOUNG BIRD When one is young, you know, then one can sing Of anything: One is so young--so pleasurably so-- How can one know If God made little apples, or yet pears, Or ... if God cares? You are young, maybe, Grackle; that is why I want to cry Seeing you watch the poems that I say To-night, to-day ... This little boy-bird seems to nod to me With sympathy: He is so young: it must be that is why ... _As young as I!_ _Marguerite Wilkinson_ (Advancing with sedate courtesy in a long-sleeved, high-necked lecture costume.) THE RUNE OF THE NUDE I will set my slim strong soul on this tree with no leaves upon it, I will lift up my undressed dreams to the nude and ethical sky: This bird has his feathers upon him: he shall not have even a sonnet: Until he is stripped of his last pin-plume I will sing of my mate and I!