pulsing the four-beat his poems favored.
He started to sing a song that drifted
from the question of what would’ve happened
had the Argo sailed beside their island.
He sang how the snake on sandy Lemnos
was studying divination the night when the hero
came with the queen to his cave, where their fucking
would conceive no rumors; how Hypsipyle shrieked
when the snake lifted his laminar snout,
and Jason’s sword severed his head,
and he tossed it outside and took Hypsipyle
back in his arms, and their ardor smeared
cold blood as the head bounced to the foot
of the legless mountain and made it to shore;
how Okeanos held the head in his left hand
and brought it as far as brumous Britain,
which the Argonauts would never reach;
how Boreas heard the head narrate
its unmerited mutilation;
how Boreas wept; how he blew for vengeance
and forced Jason to journey south;
how Lynceos, the Argo’s lookout,
detected the river’s toothless mouth
north of a less magnificent Knossos;
how the crew would’ve landed on Crete that hour,
if it hadn’t been for the bronze robot
Talos, constructed by the Telchines
in old Asterion’s open palace;
how he spotted them first and sped to the shore
and hurled stones, which struck their hull
and would’ve sunk them were the Argo
not guarded by Hera; how his whole life
navigated from his nailed foot
up a single vein to his varicose brow;
how Herakles proclaimed their doom;
how the Lemnian princess approached the stern
and braving bombardment bared her breasts;
how Talos stubbed his toeless foot