William Howard Taft Is the Total Man of Glubbal Glub: Day Fourteen

The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal.The President ordains.But does
The body lift its heavy wing, take up,

Again, an inexhaustible being, rise
Over the loftiest antagonist
To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?

from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

I drew the bee’s sting extra long because that’s how it feels going into my leg, and I chose William Howard Taft to wear this particular costume because I feel that his mustache invests him with a certain authority—also because it always delighted me that he had a special bathtub made for himself after he got stuck a few times in the regular one. Did you know he was the last president to have had facial hair? That’s what Wikipedia tells me, at least. Wikipedia also tells me that “There is some evidence that his mother started calling him my pudgy-wudgy boy before his fifth birthday," a fact which no one would have appreciated more than Wallace Stevens himself.