A cave’s entrance cast sunlight
in ungrateful eyes, and green canopies
spread beneath him. He knew he’d live.
Ida’s forests were full of creatures
(or so he’d heard) who’d sympathize
with a life straddling distinct species:
fauns and centaurs, satyrs and dryads.
While his grandfather finished or started
his daily cruise across the sky,
the branches buoyed birds warbling
ostinatos unknown to Knossian ears.
Asterion stopped and stared at the ceiling,
on whose flat surface someone had etched
figured wisdom or a failed ekphrasis:
a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat,
a phallic beard, and fluffy sandals,
was persuading skeletons to escape from urns
feet first while bees or flies hovered
in the air no relief could delineate.
Asterion’s neck started to hurt,
but he lay on the ground to look up longer,
until dozing induced a dream
about a craftsman banished from home
and appointed to design zigzagging arcades,
whose winding would sire wandering eyes,
pirouetting on impatient paths—
like Phrygian Maeander, who flows for fun,
backward and forward, confusing his waves,
now to his source, now to the sea,
keeping his precarious current frothing—
so the craftsman crammed uncountable paths
with circumlocution; the arcades were so tangled
it was difficult for Daedalus himself
to retrieve their only entrance and exit.
There he trapped the boy-bull, the two-folder,
but no one seemed to notice Asterion
as he walked all over the unwalled palace.
The removal of the “Minotaur” made
his mother alluring to Minos again.
Pasiphaë groaned, and Glaukos crowned,
an orange scalp, a solar insult.
As the labyrinth arose, it deranged Knossos:
the harbor’s piers procreated,
despising ships and aspiring to weave
a lattice no one could navigate;
the marketplace multiplied stalls
till getting across it required a guide;
the palace, once a patent hall,
became a place where a curious boy
could lose himself. Pasiphaë let
Glaukos roam. Glad to purge
orange from her eyes, Pasiphaë settled them
on the afternoon’s absolute blue,
where sky caught sea across her sill.
No mimic clouds—but she kept thinking
of the dancing dolls Daedalus prepared
for her wedding feast—the ones Minos
decapitated just because he could.
The boy was playing with a ball named Sminth,
which he thought was really a rolling mouse.
Glaukos chased the cheese-lover
out of the slaves’ preoccupied sight.
When Minos came for the midday meal,
he said he wanted to see the boy,
but nobody knew where he’d gone.
Minos commanded his mustered troops
to search all Knossos, but nothing turned up.
Minos compelled Hupakoë
to go back to Greece with gifts for Apollo
and ask the Delphic oracle where
Glaukos was hiding. Harvest had ended,
and the sea would craze: if they safely reached
the mainland, they’d still be stuck in Phocis,
and the Pythia was a pitiless bitch.
But Hupakoë obeyed and bore the storms
better than Minos bore his absence,
awaiting the oracle’s hexameters.
Minos wondered if his wife had done
something to Glaukos. Her grief smirked
through the mourning season.
He decided to die, / He decided to kill her,
but Hupakoë forestalled him. The Pythia announced
that Crete would welcome a weird creature
on the equinox, and whoever found
the metaphor that fit it best
would also find the orange heir.
A cowherd brought a calf to Knossos
that was blank in the morning, blushing by noon,
and black by sunset. Summoned to the court,
Daedalus watched the weird creature
an entire day yet didn’t know
what to call it. The king grew bored
watching Daedalus watching the calf:
You’re supposed to be the big inventor!
Daedalus, make me a metaphor!
But the calf’s inconstant colors baffled him:
the more he stared, the more he stuttered.
A bard was present, a poor Argive
named Polyeidos, who played the lyre
and sang sad songs for Pasiphaë.
Forgive me, Lord Minos, for meddling.
Permit me to hazard a metaphor.
Minos nodded. No one else,
will do my bidding today, it seems.
That right, De-de-de-daedalus?
Argive, make me a metaphor.
Polyeidos completed the task:
This morphing calf is a mulberry.
Minos clapped uncallused hands,
Pasiphaë snuck a smile at her bard,
and Daedalus studied the dolphin tiles.
Minos jiggled on his gypsum throne:
You did well, Argive. Daedalus—he’s finished,
but you’ve only begun. He gave the bard
a helmet, a sword, and a hive of keys.
Start in the palace: He’s probably hiding
somewhere nearby. If the boy’s not here,
you’ll have to look in the labyrinth.
But the Minotaur’s mouth is insatiable.
With a sword in your hand, you’ll have a chance.
Polyeidos went to the west garden
while the calf’s blankness had barely stippled.
He walked the footpaths and waded the fishponds
and crawled under every bush
that was high enough for a hiding place.
He proceeded to the cabins where the slaves kept
gardening tools. Glaukos wasn’t
lurking amid the lichened retreats
of rakes and pails, but Polyeidos
enjoyed exploring this part of the palace:
he couldn’t hear the king’s tantrums,
just the “Minotaur’s” remote sobs.
Polyeidos almost forgot
that he roamed the garden on royal business.
He followed a wall aware that moss
abolished murals. Buzzing stopped him:
an owl swooped, and swarming bees
vacated their place: perched on a cellar
door, her cardiac disk ogling
Polyeidos, the owl sipped
the recent rain rilling the sill,
screeched, and soared till the sky blotted her.
Polyeidos supposed the sun
would set before he found the key
that fit the wards; he wanted to use
his sword, but the king would accuse him of mischief.
The lock admitted the last key.
He then beheld a honey urn
and a boy’s ankles—brim antenna.
When he gripped the feet they fell off the ankles.
He put them in his helmet and pulled the rest
of Glaukos out, his orange hair
a viscid sheaf. Shouldering the boy
and clutching his helmet’s capsized skullcap,
Polyeidos transported the remains
back to the palace. A black shroud
dirged around both the boy and his escort.
Minos added ocular salt
to the candied body. The bee plunder
had discouraged decay, so the king couldn’t
doubt the body’s identity.
Daedalus began drafting the prince’s
mausoleum, but Minos refused
to bury Glaukos. I’ll bring him back.
I conquered all Greece, and the gods themselves
adore Minos: Death can’t keep him
without my approval. Hupakoë,