and I’ll sacrifice a finback for you —
lying fishes! They loot your wind,
but their lungs rarely reach your altars.
O wind-master, make me flutter
like a samara to Minos, my love!
The parapet needled her palms till her knees
replaced them. Then her sandals plucked a parting
arpeggio from Apollo’s stones
as the princess jumped off. But her prayer hadn’t
reached Aeolia, whose ruler never
heard what she promised, with his horses clopping
his cave’s portal and a priestess droning
what he thought were prayers, but piles of apples
and blooming olive-branches couldn’t
screen the scream the sky levied,
a birth cost. Canacee lay
on a sham altar no sheep had bloodied
when Aeolus peeped through the olive-branches
and found her brother’s boy at her breast.
But there was another wind-god nearby,
and it enraged Boreas that Aeolus reaped
Scylla’s worship, while the one puffing
in her face and granting ungrateful breath
went unacknowledged. Her nubile palms,
whose sweat he raced the sun to guzzle,
had reminded him of Eurynome.
He sloughed off his hair and slagged his arms
and wrapped Scylla in rubbing scales
before she could paint the paving stones,
and he flew north to a foggy island
where he took pleasure from the torn princess
while the islanders ogled at them.
She wished she’s marked each muddy face
for future revenge, but the violation
engrossed her mind till the grinding spated
and Boreas resumed his blaring north
and left her to wipe her womb’s havoc
on sering fronds and fiddleheads
while sarsens married by mortise and tenon
screened the victim from the veiled sun.
The crowd considered consuming the god’s
abandoned captive, but a boy hanging
a tall hood hovered over
Scylla and culled a scathing chord
from his lyre, which drove the droolers back.
The boy rebuked them: Bar buh bar buh
buh bar buh bar buh bar bar buh                    The harvest moon!
bar bar bay buh bar bay buh bar!                   No time to fuck!
The droolers resumed their drudgery,
and the boy removed his mantle, revealing
a scalp like bark above a homely
maiden’s grimace. Their mantle draping
Scylla’s limbs, they led the way
across the heath to a hut roofed
with leaden reeds. The lyre dazzled
the dark where Scylla dangled her tears
and the bard chanted: Bar bay buh bar!
bar bar bay buh buh bar bar buh                   Cock is the root.
buh bar buh bar bar buh bar buh.                  Every evil.
The rain relented less often
than the sun rose, and she rarely left
the bard’s hearth, whose broth she tended
while they skimmed the mud with their mantle and tried
to show their neighbors what they shouldn’t do,
dispensing wisdom or weird meter.
Her womb relinquished lunar bleeding,
but flatulence harried her flexing belly.
The hut’s lintel allowed Scylla
to view the site where the snake landed.
How many slaves must have panted
to erect a proleptically ruined temple?
Did they rear the stones to stutter pi?
She pointed at them, pouting and shrugging,
till the bard descried Scylla’s question:
Buh bar buh bar bar buh bar buh.
buh bar bar buh bar bay buh bar!                 No one knows
Bar bar bay buh. The bard couldn’t               why they’re there.
pantomime a mystery,
and Scylla’s pain scotched her drive
to understand. Her stomach’s tumult
worsened each week, and the wind’s bastard
would mark his birthday by blasting her apart.
When fiddleheads unfurled again,
Scylla enacted her need to die.
The bard knew what the knife held
by turns to her throat and her tumored womb
insinuated, though her singing remained
as opaque as ever: Aws oon aws oon
awn oos awn oos oos awn oon aws
oon aws oon aws oos awn oos awn!