When the final grains her grandfather sowed
settled in evening, Ariadne
commenced her climb up the marble stairs,
who drew her sweat as they dreamed of home,
a Tuscan night never disturbed
by callous orbs and their catachreses—
a home humans had hacked open
to quell their oneness in a quarry’s echoes,
to chisel them in slabs, and exchange them for discs
drawn from the veins of distant mountains.
Pasiphaë sat by the window
where the moon shaded her sharpened beauty.
She called Scylla the king’s skank,
and her candid anger calmed the princess.
Wine bowls improved their wit at Scylla’s
expense, but didn’t inspire them
to agree on a method for removing her safely.
But they’d just started studying this problem,
and their future meetings would be more productive.
An ironic sunrise, the setting moon
reminded Ariadne she must return
to her own part of the palace quickly
or daylight would prevent her from disavowing
the visit she paid to her vicious mother.
An awareness of wine’s wobbly dangers
and diminished moonlight mitigated
her step, so she didn’t disturb the stairs.
She made it back to her bed safely,
and soon she was holding a severed head,
and Megaran gore gave the throne room’s
floor tiles a red sea wreathing patches
of blueness where the beached dolphins
were watching their kin cutting the waves.
Her mother howled Aha! Pipes!
and intestines fell from her father’s wound.
You murderer! arraigned a dirty
anagram torqued by the timbrels gripping
the ear’s horizon. The red rescued
the beached dolphins, dousing all blue,
their fins provoking filial vengeance.
Her blade just sunk through Pasiphaë’s ribcage
when Dionysus drunkenly staggered
into the melee, which he misinterpreted
as a bacchante rite. He caressed the avenger,
who had finally beaten Phaedra’s beauty,
and made her his wife as the Maenads hailed
the god’s pleasure with pipes and timbrels
and Euoi! Euoi! Yielding her crown
was no disaster. Dionysus dispatched it
from her head to heaven, so Helios’s grandchild
could shine among immortal fires.
The crown soared through the subtle breezes,
and piercing them, its polished gems
morphed into flames, which remain in a pattern
that resembles a crown, positioned between
the serpent-bearer and the bending knee.