and his ship wounded waves with its keel:
the green blueness rebuked its abusers,
but Hupakoë ignored the whitened waves.
He pondered how best to put it to Minos
that there’d be no undoing the death of his son.
According to many of Crete’s elders,
Minos revered virtue and truth
when he still felt his crown. Then Cretans were pure
and worshipped goats, not the wild bulls.
Then King Minos communed with his people:
he breathed their songs, they braided his speech.
But he visited the Telchines
one day and saw them inditing metal,
and the spoken word spoiled like a petal
ripped from its calyx. Crete’s righteousness
was too delicate. He’d temper it
by inditing laws in indelible bronze.
The king’s green mind cooled orange,
but royal laws corrupted the rest
of Crete more slowly, creeping up
the mountains last, where luxury hadn’t
even arrived as a rumor’s herald.
The Cretans didn’t curse their furrows
for their winter fear: there were no furrows.
They chewed the grains off chaffy ears.
They lacked black dye and dug no graves.
Bugs taught mothers how to mourn gently
(Eternal death didn’t exist).
Pure and unwounded wells were the center
of their brief lives. They loved each swallow
though it hurt their teeth. To hoard grape pulp
would have struck them as a stupid waste.
Natural perception was nuanced enough;
nonviolent sex, their secret weapon.
Knossos was only an annoying daydream,
and urban life allured no rats
aere legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat
iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindice tuti.
nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem,