sometimes imagined. Circe had taught
Pasiphaë sorcery’s rudiments.
She remembered a spell especially suited
to making Minos miserable.
Performing it required the queen to draw
a wine bowl of blood from one of their children.
She could only count on Deucalion
(the most pathetic of the three survivors),
who visited the tower weekly.
She got him drunk and drew his blood
with a hollow tine while he had his nap.
She poured the blood down a blackened dildo,
and her cryptic chanting concluded with this:
Minos, next time you take your pleasure
upon that slut, may your seed resemble
the critters pumping your cruel heart!
Her apostrophe compelled the king’s
unknowing obedience: that night his exertions
culminated in a crunching noise
as he shot scorpions up Scylla’s womb,
which felt their claws before their poison
truncated her Cretan tenure.
At a safe distance, he saw the black
avengers creep from her vulva crimsoned.
He correctly guessed the originator
of the curse, whose wording wasn’t perfect:
“That slut” could serve as Pasiphaë’s deictic.
And the spell wasn’t a one-off event:
the war bride’s fate would befall any
woman receiving his weird semen.
He tested his curse’s continuation
on concubines who couldn’t foresee
the pains his desire would exact from them.
Minos indulged in moderate mourning—
enough sadness to season revenge.
Soon the scorpions were scuffling
inside him to egg on Pasiphaë’s death.
Minos pointed his pinky index
at her tower and gave his goons instructions:
Bring its inmate, that brazen slut,
to the late queen’s bower, where I’ll lie in wait.
The goons trudged up the tower’s steps,
which missed their home, the mountain greedy
mammals reconfigured with defacing mattocks,
forcing them to face the vault.
When the goons carried Deucalion
and his mother down, did their footfalls
cast any meaning? Were the marble steps
celebrating Pasiphaë’s doom,
or were those thuds their way of protesting?
Their transference escaped the scrutiny
of Helios, who was off duty,
sowing metaphorical seed while his coursers
carried on his catachresis.
Minos waited in his murdered bride’s
bower, whose entrance Deucalion banged
with bleeding fists till they blotted the threshold.
Each limb held down by a different goon,
Pasiphaë suffered the curse she’d cast.
Mourning her became Deucalion’s excuse
for abridging his spells of sobriety.
A summer night’s solitary wine
compelled him to sleep on parapets.
From the West Garden’s unweeded darkness,
a heart-faced owl hooted just once,
but that was enough to nudge the prince
out of his drunken dreamlessness.
He rolled over, and the royal brow
fissured on stones that refused to make way.
Unable to sire a son to replace him
or dominate his daughters, Minos
could see that revenge had settled nothing.
(And what would happen when Helios
heard how his daughter died?)
The people wondered what had gone wrong
inside the palace, but somehow Minos
kept his secret from common knowledge.
Each winter cast a curse on his enemies:
when Boreas thrust Thracian air
into Attica, the air itself
was no colder than normal, but no one
knew the new god’s name, so their prayers
were blind apostrophes, and their bloody altars’
smoke rarely found his four nostrils.
The rich piled up rugs and mantels
and slept under them while their slaves tended
their fireplaces. The free peasants
were the ones who froze when the freak that Scylla
had brought forth hindered their hinges from working.
If the peasants hammered planks across
the uprights, Doorway would drop the lintel
and the roof with it, ruining them.
When blue mothers’ embraces provided
no more heat, their numb children
crawled outside in the cryptic sunlight.
Doubled faces and a deficit
of pity were what distinguished
Doorway, who never knew Olympus.
Human suffering is heaven’s meat,
but the gods hadn’t taught him table manners.
Human life was less unstable
in Crete, where Minos murdered oxen
in secret rites, which satisfied
Doorway and permitted Minos to keep
his monopoly on the new god’s name.
Because of rumors that in Crete doors closed
(and, anyway, winters were mild there),
thousands of Greeks gave up their homes
for failed crossings and fishes’ company.
But thousands survived their voyages.
These refugees enraged the Cretans
who still believed what they’d learned during wartime,
that every Greek’s an ungrateful liar.
This view was not universally held;
in fact, many feasted the Greeks
upon their arrival, and the ruddy skin
of the Cretans struck them as strangely attractive.
Shipwrecks needled the northern shallows.
It offended the king that the coasts were open
to any comer, so he called for Daedalus:
I want you to build me a beautiful wall
along the coast to keep away
these pathetic cowards—and thorns on top
would make it even more menacing.
The engineer nodded at Minos,
went home to commence work on schematics,
locked himself in, and laughed out tears.
When Boreas mellowed, messengers sailed
to Attican cities and said that the conqueror
had doubled the tribute his subdued enemies
were required to pay to quell his ambition
to rule all Greece directly; reneging
on the doubled tribute would attract his armada.
The misery caused by unclosable doors
repeated each winter, compelling Greeks
to flee toward Crete, whose coastal dwellers
mocked the wall Minos wouldn’t pay for:
it stood a few stadia north
of Knossos—a nub anointed with bird shit.
Only a few of the foreigners
saw its pale bricks as they sailed in: it loomed
primarily for local eyes.
Lacking the funds to finish the wall,
Minos consoled himself with the thought
that his loyal people would lynch any
Greeks who managed to get around it.
But the Cretans were slow to slay them: they noticed
many refugees were masters of useful
skills that Minos had discouraged only
because they bored him. Sheer competence
soon earned the Greeks grudging respect
even from zealous xenophobes.
Most refugees remained in Crete
when the new god let northern hinges
turn normally. Need had trickled
up Olympus as loss of livestock
reduced the surplus ascending as smoke
to divine nostrils. Vexed for a decade
by complaints from his whining wife and his would-be
usurpers, finally, Zeus consented
(he’s quick only in quashing innocents)
to punish Doorway. He dropped lightning
where the scalps convened. The scalded god
had no memory of Minos. Demeter’s son
wiped his pus and deposited him
in a bathtub full of ambrosia, bubbling
as Hermes’ convoy hauled it to Latium,
where the double coma dragged on for centuries
in a cave that gave the god two views
of the warping Tiber when he awoke
remembering neither his name nor the lightning.
This poem is lost in Latium, so far
from the Knossian matters it must resume,
and transition’s god has deserted the poet,
so how will I tell you what happened in Crete:
how the Greeks believed his love of boys
had deprived Minos of male successors;
how the native Cretans in Knossos blamed
the foreigners for the feeble harvests
afflicting Crete since they crossed the sea
with their mathematics and methods for casting
bronze idols of braggart patrons;
how temples, whose building was forbidden in Knossos,
reared their pillars in rural villages
where Minos mustered the least allegiance
and where most locals mingled with Greeks
till red teats plumped pinker progeny;
how the seven men sent by Athens
never arrived in Knossos as planned
but separated and assembled armies
in remote regions royal officials
rarely visited; how, realizing
the doubled tribute would do him no good
if it wasn't punctual, the king decided
to spend the remains of his spoils to lengthen
the wall till it girded his gaping city;
how the rebel peasants rushed inside
from the foothills where the wall was unfinished;
how Minos fled to the unmapped maze;
how Theseus, the Athenian Seven’s
leader, loaded a linen bag
with green pebbles from a palace fishpond;
how his manhood and his heart hardened
as Phaedra knelt before him and tried
to save Minos by simpering;
how her sister hid behind a woodpile
and made no sound or sudden movements
when a bee stung her, but stood watching
the pair from the shadow of a shed till she heard him
appease Phaedra with a false promise;
how the prince began to explore the maze,
depositing one of the wet pebbles
at each corner he turned to record his route,
re-bagging the pebbles that would bring him to dead ends,
whose abundance became as boring as his father’s
daily laments on life’s misery;
how at last he met the Minotaur,
who was standing on his toes and tearing straw
from upper bricks; how the bronze-helmeted
hero, hiding his horror, commanded
the monster to tell him where Minos had gone;