Let him try to burrow with his bantam horns!
From today onward let the only meat
I’ll eat be beef! The engineer
bowed his concurrence and accompanied
the mercenaries up the marble steps,
who hated the sun and the sea breezes
and missed the dry darkness of home,
the Apennines, beneath the eagles’
mellow chisels. When the mercenaries dragged
Pasiphaë and her son down,
thuds applauded her punishment
or lamented the doomed valedictory hoofs.
Dark led to dark, an Idaean dimple
that bricks smeared flat before her father
could illumine the east and look inside.
Their hungers became occult sundials
in the arche-darkness, where a day had no length
and hours coiled as catachreses.
Chained to her son and the sweating rock,
she prayed: Mount Ida, mother of Crete,
honey-nymph, and heaven-ward,
the ground’s ground and the gods’ fulcrum,
you who do the work that whining Atlas
ponderously fakes to passing heroes,
forgive our intrusion and the gouging torus
and our captors’ clamor and the clay impostors
defacing the real rocks that Rhea
preferred to Thessaly’s frigid thrones.
Like Saturn, who hoped to deceive the Moirai
by swallowing his likely successors, my husband
has hidden his heir in your holy rock—
at least the god had enough good manners
to suffer his own indigestion.
We are innocent, not innocuous:
don’t let our flesh defile your depths!
If you vomit us, we’ll devote ourselves
to raising an altar at your eastern foot
where Minos will burn for his blasphemy!