I’ve mastered a method for fixing your feet
so you can frolic freely with your friends like you used to
instead of getting stuck here studying all day.
I’ll let you in on a little secret:
when I first arrived in your father’s kingdom,
he asked me to fix Ariadne’s feet:
they were swollen and knotted, and no one could help her
until I designed the zig-zag tiles.
You’ll find no dolphins on that dancing floor,
but, prince, just walk on it once, and I promise
you’ll be able to lick live dolphins at leaping.
Glaukos steadied his Stygian stare
at Daedalus, which drove him away.
The prince knew the floor had fixed her feet,
but Athenian truths were trickery.
And he didn’t care that he couldn’t leap:
his memory sublated bodily motion,
and boyish games were a bore compared
to what he was learning. It wasn’t long
before he could find the future in the present.
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 them when they flee Knossos,
and once they set sail, he’ll decide he prefers
the younger sister. It’d be absurd to marry
an untrustworthy woman who betrayed her own father,
so he’ll ditch his savior on a sandbar off Dia.
He’ll be in no rush to reach Athens.
Through prolonged nights and lazy days,
he’ll dream of fucking Phaedra differently
on each island in the Archipelago.
(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 notch
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.
The king was annoyed that the coup he had feared
for most of his reign would amount to nothing
and that Daedalus had lied to him:
You said no one—not excepting you,
who sketched its skein—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 sprung
Daedalian semen the day before.
Soon Minos was taking his meals in bed.
Senility narrowed his desires.
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 longer. At last, the Argive
was standing on a pier with his student, who predicted
a peaceful voyage to the Peloponnese.
Before the bard boarded the ship,
he put his knees to the pier and asked
the boy to spit in his bearded mouth.
So fascinated by the knowable futures
of the people around him, the prince had neglected
predicting his own. He didn’t care
about the life his resurrection had raped from Hades.
He gave his teacher a goodbye kiss,
not foreseeing his spit would consign his science.
Though the voyage was peaceful, Polyeidos
couldn’t realize the lesson he swallowed.
His imagination multiplied
what Glaukos had only glimpsed on one scroll.
The deaths awaiting him wove bewilderment
between possible worlds. The worst was actually
a kind of survival, where the king offered
three times his weight in women or gold,
and he chose women, though a warning sang
in the mind whose worth the Muses were weighing.
The bard’s bony body didn’t
burden his side of the balance much.
Then Minos said: Pasiphaë,
climb in the pan with the pair of daughters
you allege are mine. Your lust for livestock
puts your entire past into doubt.
Phaedra nearly fainted when she heard this —
unlike her sister, who simply pouted,
her lips favoring her father’s sneer.
Their mother knew they’d emerge unharmed
from this prank once Minos had humiliated them.
The women crowded the wobbling pan
while slaves filled the other with octopuses,
leveling the beam one lurch at a time.
The women weighed a little less
than thrice their winner, which wasn’t what Minos
had expected to happen (it’s hard to think
two steps ahead). His stutter vanquished,
his eyes barely able to blink
in their bruised sockets, the bard’s rival
advised the king: Cut off one arm
and his weight will match his women’s total.
These words gave rise to the royal smirk,
which burst to vex the bard’s victory:
Argive, listen: losing one arm’s
not a disaster. We know Orpheus
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 produce,
insisted he die; the second wanted
to allow the bard to live since they’re were
no other men on that miserable island
who could render their thoughts in rhythmic form.
They compromised, which cost him his hands
and soon disappointed the second party).
For a moment, the bard balanced his prizes,
but he’d 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 their whips.
The bard is they. They bombard their prey,
troping the task of the translator.