Both poetry and mathematics are forms of madness, the latter well disguised by what appears to be its rational method and application, e.g. facing west we plot a course to the third star to the left of that cottonwood where we pledge that someday we will travel. We are eagerly triangulating when a poet comes by and we dazzle him with our mathematical machinations. He seems for a moment unsteady on his feet and asks us to sit with him. We do, feeling sorry for our hyperbolics, but then, as if our diverging equations had actually driven him crazy, he begins to spout utter nonsense. He tells us we have already arrived where we seek to go and that the leaves are laughing at us. “Can you not see how the descending darkness of the evening is becoming one with the shadow of the tree?” We politely acknowledge the plain truth of what he says and, using that same darkness as an excuse, say we have to go. As we are walking off, we look back and then stare at each other: there’s no one there. We return to where we thought he had been and now, a little unsteady ourselves, sit again beneath the cottonwood, laughing ourselves into each other’s arms.