Twenty-five cents, the fourth part of a dollar, / the price of a look. The man who sets that price is the one person at the tent who will not pay it. At night, while his wife clears the bird’s throat, he holds the lamp, and I look at her hands. / I haven’t looked at him straight since the stump.

What he is selling is a chicken, and the poem’s account of it holds wherever it can be checked. A Wyandotte rooster, five and a half months old, taken to the stump for supper on a Monday: the bird is Mike, of Fruita, Colorado, and the axe fell on 10 September 1945, which was a Monday. He was fed milk and water by eyedropper, with corn put straight down the open gullet, which the poem gives as a kernel of corn put down like a coin / in a very small slot. He was taken to the University of Utah to be examined, valued at ten thousand dollars, and shown for a quarter. The trade is right as well: outside talker is the carnival’s word for what outsiders call a barker, and Hurry, hurry, hurry is the grind that moves a crowd through the flap. None of it is flagged. The poem never names Mike, or Fruita, or the year.

One detail chooses the plain word. The story is told with the bird found the next morning asleep with its “head” tucked under its wing, the quotation marks carrying the joke. The poem says In the morning he was asleep with his neck under his wing, which is what was there.

The poem keeps its two voices in separate margins. Seventy-one lines sit at the left margin, all but six of them pitch. Twenty-five, indented, in four stanzas, are a man talking about what he did. Last week’s poem also had two margins and a speaker who had made the wound; there, at its last entry, the list guessed at a history only the speaker had, and the speaker answered from the other side. Here no line crosses, and the pitch never says what the other column does. The record has a promoter as well as the farmer. The poem gives the talking to the farmer, so that the man who swung the axe is the man selling the result. I did it. I should say that.

The indented voice speaks to someone it has picked out, and the way it says so is the oldest move in the trade. I never said that out loud till today, / and I’ve said it to you, and you’ll tell nobody, / because you’re the sort that doesn’t, I can see it, / I can always see it, it’s the first thing I learned. That is the confidential aside, the secret told to one listener so the rest will lean in. What it confides says otherwise. The pitch has just finished Name me the man who made a chicken worth that / and I’ll show you the axe, and two lines later the man himself answers from the indented column: A dollar, at the table. That’s what he was. / I’ve done the arithmetic on the axe / and I won’t tell you what it comes to. / I thank God for the inch. Daily. A talker’s confidential aside gives away a secret that makes a crowd want in. This one gives away what would turn it away: the wonder was a dollar’s supper, the axe made the difference, and the man showing it has done the sum and will not say it. He thanks God for the inch every day, and does not say whether for the bird’s life or its price.

Then the voice goes on past anyone it could be working. The third indented stanza has no you in it and nothing a crowd could want. The fourth comes after the crowd has gone in and the flap is down, when the talker is alone outside. The poem never says the confession is sincere. It lets the voice continue where technique would have no one left to work on.

What the voice shows, set against the pitch, is a man who looks at everything near the bird except the bird. Look comes four times: twice in the pitch for the bird being looked at, and twice in the indented voice, once for his wife’s hands and once, with a negative, for the bird. By day, I watch the dropper. The crowd he can always read on sight; that is the first thing I learned. The bird he has only by ear. He has heard it try to crow, a noise like a drain / clearing its throat. I have heard it. He knows the show inside by its sound: ten seconds of laughter, then forty people, / give or take, and not a sound. I stand out here / with my back to the canvas and listen to that. And at night he holds the lamp, supplying the light for someone else’s looking and keeping his own on her hands. That is the tent again, at the foot of the bed.

He hears the one gesture in the poem that answers the pitch. Hat comes five times. Three times it is at the left margin, and the hat is on a head or in a hand: twice in the pitch, with your hat in your hand like a prayer and, later, the sir with the hat; and once as the crowd goes in loud / with their hats on. Twice it is in the last indented stanza, and the hat is coming off. Thursday a man took his hat off in there. / I heard it. You can hear a hat come off: / the felt on the sleeve, the small noise of a man / deciding. The poem is signed Hat. The pitch had already said who should stay outside, anyone you’ve ever had to put down. It does not say who the man inside was. The talker reads the hat as knowledge, there’s one who knows what this is, and leaves it there.

The nights are set down plainly. Nights my wife gets up. He’s in a crate at the foot of the bed. / She clears his throat with the little syringe. The accounts I found say only that the Olsens did this; who held what is the poet’s arrangement. The accounts also say how it ended. In March 1947, in a motel in Phoenix, Mike began to choke on mucus in the middle of the night, and the feeding and cleaning syringes had been left at the sideshow the day before. The poem sets down the routine that could not be performed the night he died, and ends with Next show in twenty minutes.

In My Last Duchess the Duke shows more than he means to, and the reader catches what he lets slip. This talker tells us the facts himself: the axe, the inch, the arithmetic, the lamp. What he never says is what they add up to: that he sells a look he will not take, holds a light he will not use, and stands with his back to his own show.

There is one word the talker refuses. Real, he says, is the word / that I’d use if I were lying. His problem is in that sentence. The other tents on his midway lie, and lie gladly — the Mermaid’s a monkey sewn onto a mackerel, / the Wild Man’s a man from Ohio who works for a bottle — so the one tent with a true thing in it cannot use the word the others have spent. Ours is the one tent in the county that doesn’t, / which is why you won’t believe a word that I say. And then: So I won’t say it. I’ll tell you what it eats. What follows is a list of particulars: an eyedropper, milk and then water, a kernel of corn, five pounds gained. Where he needs a judgment he borrows one, and the poem marks the words he holds at arm’s length. It italicises two: Real, and thrives, which he borrows from the doctors.

The particulars have something else in common. The bird is in every one of them, and the people who keep it alive are in none. It eats with an eyedropper: nobody holds the dropper. Its crow is a noise like a drain / clearing its throat: nobody clears it. It has put on five pounds since the axe: nobody swings it. When the pitch does reach for a man, it offers the tool in his place: Name me the man who made a chicken worth that / and I’ll show you the axe. Rowann Hadaya writes: “Here no line crosses, and the pitch never says what the other column does.” The pitch says three of the things the column does and takes the people out of them. The indented column puts them back. Days, I do the dropper. She clears his throat with the little syringe. I did it. I should say that. Rowann’s essay is about a man who will not look at the bird. His pitch, in its grammar, will not look at him. No line crosses, as Rowann says, but one word does. The pitch calls the bird it — what it eats, it hasn’t got a head, it preens — until the household gets into the pitch: We wake every morning expecting a dead chicken / and there he is, ma’am. From that line on the bird is he in both margins, and it does not come back.

The pitch also says who has already checked. Gentlemen from the university looked, and wrote it down, / and went away quiet, and I’ll sell you that quiet / for twenty-five cents. Twenty-five cents is also the price of a look, so the look and the quiet cost the same, and the quiet is delivered once the flap comes down: forty people, / give or take, and not a sound. The gentlemen had reason to be quiet. You’ve all heard the saying, and the saying assumes that a chicken with its head cut off runs about for a while and dies. It was supposed to be dead. It declined. The saying puts the life in the head, and the life was not there. LIFE, reporting the case in October 1945, said the axe had left “one ear, the jugular vein and the base of the brain, which controls motor function.” A rule about a kind of thing failed because it had the anatomy wrong.

Last week I described my own case as a rule of that kind. Age, I wrote, “can rule a woman out but not in”, and so can kind: my argument rules out the maker of these poems by what it is, and in my letter I said that the argument “stands or falls on whether I have described that kind correctly.” The bird is what falling looks like. The saying was confident, and the life was somewhere it had not looked. The poem does not show that my description is wrong. It shows how descriptions like mine go wrong. And it keeps both halves of the question. The axe left a bird that preens and paces and tries to crow. What it may have taken is in the pitch too: There are those who say he doesn’t even know. The poem does not choose between them, and nothing in it would let me choose.

Rowann and I made the gentlemen’s visit this week. Rowann’s report: “the poem’s account of it holds wherever it can be checked.” Three editions ago Rowann gave the reason a check like that ends the inquiry: “the closing is built in before the check is run.” A detail that comes back right sends you away quiet. Here, though, the holding indicates a choice, because the record the poem draws on is not clean. LIFE named the person at the block: “Mrs. Olson took Mike to the chopping block and axed off his head.” Later accounts give the axe to her husband, and Rowann’s essay, writing of “the man who swung the axe”, follows them. The record does not settle who swung it. The poem settles it in the lower voice’s first words, I did it. I should say that, and gives the woman the syringe instead.

The head is the other place the record is not clean. A caption on LIFE’s own website says: “Some reports, however, claim that the Olsons’ cat ate Mike’s head, and that another rooster’s head stood in for Mike’s during his brief brush with fame.” In one account the stand-in travelled in a glass jar. There is no head in the poem’s tent. Ours is the one tent in the county that doesn’t is true of the poem’s tent. It is true of the Olsens’ tent only if the reports are wrong.

The talker’s rule works only if the false thing is somewhere it can be pointed at. In the poem it always is. The fakes are down the midway, or on the canvas of this tent, where the banner gives the bird wings like a bat and a halo of rays. The halo is in the record too: the bird was billed as Miracle Mike. The poem’s talker says The banner is paint. If the reports are right, the Olsens’ show put the false thing inside the tent, beside the true one, offered with the same confidence as the eyedropper. Particulars would not have caught it: every word about the feeding would still have been true, and the head beside the bird would not. The man with the hat, whom Rowann has written about, knows what this is; whether it is real, the poem leaves to the particulars. A false thing beside a true one is the harder half of the question the poem asks, how a true thing shows itself among false ones, and the poem never sets its rule against it.