drowned when the branches bristled a brook
moseying toward the Mageras.
Ida loosened her old lesion,
but the hurried bricks that had blocked Helios
brained his daughter, who died shielding
the Minotaur from masonry.
He plucked the chain off the palsied stone,
but sat with his back to the oblivious sun,
and held his mother, till the mountain echoed:
Don’t wait for fire: the worms will rise.
Her flesh spoils. They’re flossing close.
Ditch your mother. The maggot dance
is a celebration whose subtlety
your priests can’t even parody.
This lithic voice was less convincing
than terrifying and forced the orphan
down slopes whose pine and plane and oak
once secreted a canopy
that mimicked most of the mountain’s contours
but now sang a dirge in dittany
where shade long flourished before Minos
decreed a navy was what Crete needed.
Grazing fostered the gravel stubbing
Asterion’s hoofs, but the stumps yielded
an open view of a valley pearled
by a blank bull bounding upward.
The lichened arrows locked in his hide
still felt they were flying, so fast did their host
climb the mountain’s clear cut face.
The bull stopped at Asterion’s foot,
and his nose hoisted the half-human
on his hump. Then his hoofs trod their own tracks,
and they passed a village as the valley prepared
to turn salty. Seeing the bull
chalk an edge of the agora
where a feast that honored Artemis was taking
a more and more unmaidenly turn,
a dozen drunks dashed to their huts
to grab their bows and glut their quivers
and hunt the bull that horrified Knossos
and was fretting their bistre boustrophedons:
when the bull learned he’d fucked a false heifer,
he wanted to destroy all the world’s wombs
and began stomping the grooved fields
(a story the king’s stubby fingers
tapped on a goblet, and gossip fetched it
wherever Crete clotted yokels).
But the drunks didn’t bend their bows
till seaweed was looping the littoral hooves.
The bull strung air and strode billows.
When the Minotaur removed his hoof
from the nostrils he feared would fill with water,
the waves meshed a wobbly meadow
that could nauseate but never drown
the bull whose candor had caused Minos
to sacrifice his second-best,
angering Poseidon, who sent a horse
to neigh gently beneath the queen’s
window while Minos was murdering Greeks.
Moonlight besieged her sleeping face:
Remember you learned to love a bull
before you learned to loathe a man:
When they celebrated the sea abduction,
purple ribbons plaited your hair
and what Cretans deemed a Sidonian gown
fought the breeze to embrace your knees
and the priestesses perched you safely
on the bull wading the water’s edge
and the goosebumps scaled your skinny legs
and the auloi blazed and the incense boomed
and you were Europa and the rhoptra roared
and the waves worshipped and the tide tarried
and your father sang himself to sleep
and Minos was only a milksop bore.
The queen awoke wishing to lie
prone on pastures, and compelled her friends
to dress like cowherds and accompany
their lonesome queen up the lush foothills
where she saw the white bull encircled by heifers,
whose moos she mimicked, amusing her friends,
whose furtive whispers failed to determine
whether she was joking or genuinely mad.
Your Highness, let’s go home. We’ve had our fun!
But the queen denied her knees relief.
Grass hurt her teeth, and her greed tapered.
She wanted that bull, that white one,
all for herself. Aphrodite
received Pasiphaë’s silent prayer:
Let his tepals breach my bristling stipule,
and golden oysters will glare on your altars.
But Aphrodite was occupied,
and the bull ignored the fore-nippled kneeler.
She wanted to hide, to weep in the dark.
They left the foothills, and she locked herself
alone in her tower, and she looked at the sea
and imagined her husband’s armada burning