and the bard could retract the truth in one strophe
by filling the next with flattering drivel.
But imagination nudged the truth
into thoughts about how things could’ve
gone differently. He gazed at the back
of the orange head overhanging his view
of the marble head and imagined a new-born
god with two faces flailing a lock
in the dust fog of a fallen gate.
The god commanded Minos to marry
Scylla, the daughter of the scalped king.
Although she was too tanned for his taste,
Minos obeyed. They boarded a trireme
glutted with Megaran gold and jewels.
His first queen hadn’t finished weaning
her horned son when her husband returned
and commanded his domestic minions to take
the Minotaur away from the monster who bore him.
Minos decided to remove his bedchamber’s
shame and enclose it in a copious network
of blind arcades. The best craftsman,
Daedalus, worked out a way to build it
that would upset anyone’s orientation:
its winding would sire wandering eyes,
pirouetting on impatient paths—
like Phrygian Maeander, who flows for fun,
backward and forward, confusing his waves,
now to the source, now to the sea,
keeping his precarious current busy—
so the craftsman crammed uncountable paths
with circumlocution; the arcades were so tricky
it was difficult for Daedalus himself
to retrieve their only entrance and exit.
There he trapped the boy-bull, the two-fold figure.
He let Pasiphaë live alone
under house arrest in her high tower.
But he made a mistake in permitting her natural
children to visit, a chore he supposed
that Ariadne would always shirk.
He knew the others were innocuous:
his son and heir was an air-headed sot,
and his beautiful Phaedra feared him too much.
But his calculations left out Scylla.