There’s a Rooster aboard the Battleship, and: Nothing Else, and: Robert Frost Embarks on Goodwill Tour of Soviet Republics

There’s a Rooster aboard the Battleship

I’m the first and last intelligence at sea, not a guest on the water but never quite at home. My crown’s a blood blister, the Milky Way a frozen spark twinkling in the nailhead of my one good eye. My cock-a-doodle-doo makes red the essence of light and heavy things, mosquito nets and twelve-inch guns, the coldness of dress whites thrown on in wee hours, hooch bottles capsized, like lifeboats turning their hot red bottoms in the blue of the paschal moon! Curse my name like the devil’s but remember I’m your god. Go for my throat if you must. Or take your Dixie cup hat in your trembling hands, raise your eyes to me and thank your earthly mom and pop, dim suggestions of themselves with none of my boldness of poise, putting you in a sailor suit and putting you out to sea. An astrologer had told them you should die by water, and here you are, in my little boat, dying of nothing. Scanning the winking sea. A telescope on another boat winks at you through yours.

Nothing Else

Who put a feather in the suggestion box? Who says that I should fly? I can sing, if nothing else, and failing that can strut around in heels, or carry them hooked on the fingers of one hand, my fluted glass in the other, or can let them drop like birds that always die in pairs on the marble floor of whatever palace I’m drunk in. Have you ever eaten at the table of the Archduke Géza von Habsburg? Ask me if I have. Have you ever heard the despairing laugh of the hawk, devouring the young ones fallen from her nest? It’s horrible, but breaks off beautifully, at unexpected moments, like the journals of M. Guillotin, who was a man with huge hands and a delicate handwriting before becoming a machine, his journals just now uppermost in enlightened minds. I sit with them all night by the fire, staying awake for some interruption, a knock on the door. I jump. My cup of pencils falls but doesn’t spill and I am grateful. How sad does that make me? Somewhere in the middle of the springtime air the hawk is giving birth, throwing up her fledglings as undigested bone. Please, Monsieur, Do Not Feed the People. They’ve never been happier or more hungry.

Robert Frost Embarks on Goodwill Tour of Soviet Republics

Mikhaylovna Plisetskaya, Queen of Swans, was on her way out for the People’s Meeting when Hermes, the houseboy, announced there was a man, and there he was, her Uncle Sam of shaggy, lowered brow, on her horsehair sofa, irretrievably drunk. How you live, she said. He was back from the dead, he said, to take it up again, the old courtship. The dropped string. His breath when she kissed him was odious— the sour weather blowing always through his words. A right and true crafts man! she’d tell the auditorium, in some kind of abstract awe, but never poet. She said it that way, crafts (one word), “man” (another) on its heels. Three months they would live, crafts man and Queen, the length of a New England season, in her Petersburg flat, making rigorous love and listening to the neighbors downstairs beat the hell out of each other, until the State slipped in and put things right where God could only fail. The ruckus they took when they were disappeared made him think of a horse on its side, trying to stand among tables and chairs. People—when they’re problems—come in pairs. She laughed like a horse when he said that and he fell right out of love, three months of hating the tulle she wore, the horse in the mouse hole, the swans in her heart that fed on grubs, what was left of his wife’s lettuce patch...