lost all his limbs—lost his torso!—
yet reduction to a head didn’t diminish
his ability to foretell the future.
Indeed, he’s the greatest diviner alive
(if you call that a life). Losing an arm
will put a halt to your harp strumming,
but you’ll have more time to teach Glaukos.
The man whose songs had mollified
the lonely queen and her queer love-child
amused no one but Minos and his rival
with the way he screeched through his weight reduction.
They let the bard collect himself
and swallow some wine before settling him back
in the raised pan for a reassessment.
And maybe it was the wine that made
him slightly exceed the women’s weight.
Daedalus proposed that Polyeidos
yield his only usable hand:
He won’t need it for the work ahead:
he can give lessons without lifting a finger.
Minos approved of this mutilation.
(By picking women, Polyeidos
had partitioned the Muses into two parties:
the first, enraged by the reification
of princesses weighed in pans like poultry,
insisted he die; the second wanted
to allow the bard to live since there were
no other men on that miserable island
who could render their thoughts in rhythmic form.
They compromised, which cost him both hands
and soon disappointed the second party).
For a moment, the bard balanced his prizes,
but he bled too much to blemish their virtue.
The king told his slaves to carry the corpse
out of his sight. They sought to give him
a dignified, though furtive, funeral,
but as they went across the West Garden,
the bard condensed to a drop of blood
plunged with a pop in a puddle and made
his eyes a wreath and writhed through the water
with a forking foot and a poet’s passion
till he swam too near the nose of a sniping
Haptoglossa, whose hushed triggers,
fired fungal cells inside
the rotifer they reconceived
as a barrel barge on the bloody film.
Tubes horrified his hull and spores
were launched from them, lashing new whips.
The bard is they. They bombard their prey,
troping the task of the translator.