each waking moment, no matter how slight.
Submerging the mind in memory
would demolish the boy’s imagination.
Daedalus hid it in a honey cake,
and Icarus brought it to the birthday boy,
in a box whose lid bore an enameled
image of Mneme knotting a string.
Pasiphaë served it to Glaukos,
who swallowed some cake and recalled events
that spoiled the party: the pithos withstanding
all his forehead’s frantic concussions;
mother’s golden grip wringing
his bare ankles where her breasts annealed;
scorpions dripping from daddy’s thing.
And every worm the way to Styx.
And every wave the way to Hades.
The gossiping dead do nothing
but pool their knowledge of the past and bet
on what will happen in a world they’ll never
visit again. Veteran ghosts,
who have honed their skill for hundreds of years,
can predict the future the fresh dead
will sadly confirm when the ferryman dumps them.
This amusing game engrossed the prince,
who made speedy progress in speculation.
When far above the berries rattled,
they sounded to Glaukos like sallow thuds.
But then Persephone snagged his ankles,
dragged him to Lethe, and dunked his head.
Glaukos awoke and forgot everything
the ghosts told him, until he bit
the honey cake. He couldn’t stop
the dripping tears, but didn’t say
why he was sad or what he remembered.
The king thought silence was for sleepers and slaves:
Glaukos, I hoped Hades would make you
worth my effort. I’ve wasted years,
and you’re still so weak! But I’m stuck with you,
at least, until . . . Look where you live!
Look what you’re eating! I’ll let you finish
your party, but remember it was me who brought you
out of Hades, Oysterfeet!
Minos waddled, muttering, away.
As his captain followed her father, Phaedra
looked at his sinewy legs and imagined
herself hugging a horse’s neck
with Hupakoë holding her hips as they galloped
along Poseidon, eluding Knossos.
She felt something new, a nimble fear.
Her brother mistook her blush for anger.
She wiped his face with her feverish palms
and gave him the ball she’d embroidered herself.
Glaukos remembered the mouse’s grin,
but he never saw Sminth in Hades.
Ariadne gave Glaukos a pair
of red slippers: We’re sick of looking
at your rotting feet! Phaedra slapped her,
and Ariadne, though the elder one,
refused to fight: she fled bawling
in search of Minos, who’d remind her sister
what her proper place in the palace was
by dashing her beauty on the dolphin tiles.
But her father snuffed out this fantasy.
She wasn’t the only one who discovered
how the future negates feasible guesses.
The things we know nurse the unknown
while the mother remains a mystery.
Glaukos remembered meeting this mother
before he suffered his second birth.
So the pharmakon counteracted
its concoctor’s purpose, empowering the boy
to recall what the bard couldn’t have taught him.
When the bard announced that the boy was ready,
Minos summoned Pasiphaë
and her daughters to hear the dooms he’d predict.
He said Ariadne would receive a kiss
from an Athenian named Theseus.
She’ll teach him how to return from the labyrinth’s
core, where he’ll stab Asterion’s back.
Phaedra will follow when they flee Knossos,
and once they set sail, he’ll decide he prefers
the younger sister. It’d be absurd for him to marry
an untrustworthy woman who betrayed her own father,
so he’ll ditch his savior on a dinghy off Dia.
Being in no rush to reach Athens,
he’ll dream of fucking Phaedra differently
on each island in the Archipelago
through prolonged nights and lazy days
(poor Ariadne, you impede alliteration).
They’ll land on Delos, where he’ll dance like a crane
to encrypt what he learned in the labyrinth.
Father, you’ll perish in a peaceful bed
after age has milked your memory dry.
Mother, the Cretan crown will dimple
the wan temples of your widowhood.
And Icarus, having robbed the king,
will feel the noose, and his father won’t save him.
They ordered Icarus to open his fist,
and the sapphire proved the prophecy right.
It annoyed the king that the coup he had feared
for most of his reign would amount to nothing.
And Daedalus had lied to him.
You said no one—not excepting yourself,
who sketched its halls—could escape from the labyrinth!
You Athenians are thicker thieves
than I thought possible. But I’ll thwart your treason!
Though Pasiphaë beseeched Minos
to show mercy to the short-sighted boy,
Icarus gasped on the gallows that had popped
Daedalian semen the day before.
Soon Minos was taking his meals in bed
where senility narrowed his lusts.
With the lazy virtue of low energy,
he kept his promise to Polyeidos
though he’d first intended to force him to stay
in Knossos much longer. At last, the Argive
was standing on a pier with his student, who predicted
an uneventful voyage to Greece.
Before the bard boarded the ship,
he put his knees to the pier and asked
the boy to spit in his bearded mouth,
and Glaukos obeyed, but the bard couldn’t
thereby deprive the prince of the skills
he’d gained watching the ghosts’ guesses.
The ship glided on glass billows,
and Polyeidos was able to see
his home shaded by the shield-shaped hill.