Ana Makes Habitable My Heart with Furniture and Houseplants of Pure Joy

I have been full of moody lousiness for the past few days, which has prevented me from giving birth to any more delicious drawings, but this morning Ana swooped into my inbox with a timely piece of art and rescued me from my doldrums. She writes: "I have attempted an artistic rendering of the first stanza of 'At Melville’s Tomb', albeit with a slightly contemporary, political air. The lines are as follows:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

In this particular rendering, D. Rumsfeld is the mythical He (Melville won’t mind); he observes the dice of drowned men’s bones (i.e. the vote) as they bequeath the Senate unto the wave, emblematic of Freedom. As he watches, the numbers gleaned from those selfsame dice beat to Playboy upon a dusty shore.

I hope you won’t object to the small liberties taken in the interpretation of Crane’s poem."

Object? Hardly. I wallow in small liberties of interpretation like so many hippos, as you have almost certainly learned by now. I delight in the many layers of this particular contribution: the looming head and crooked finger of the bygone bastard himself, the metaphorical significance of the dice and their numbers, and the obligatory high-minded sexual euphemism. The numbers are beating...off! Well-played, Ana. The hippos of my earlier metaphorical wallowing now tromp in the squealing mud of your brain-power and bask in the rays of your wit.