to wipe midnight off the walls she passed.
Talos was biting his birthday gag,
which wringed his Wee! as he rode the cow’s
inflexible back and his father pushed them
across Knossos and beneath the gateway’s
polished legs (the colossus would have
preferred to grow a green skin,
but the king wanted to keep it glowing
orange, although the acid cankered
his simulacrum and his slaves’ palms).
Pasiphaë’s maids encircled the cow:
the tallest invited Talos to ride
on her back, and she put him to bed with Deucalion;
the others carried the cow to the tower
and pulled it up the polished steps,
who hated the sun and the sea breezes
and missed their mountains’ dry darkness,
the Apennines: whenever the cow
picked their nosings or pounded their treads,
they remembered the dings of distant mattocks.
Pasiphaë watched from her windowsill
as the cow threaded the corkscrew tower.
Daedalus explained his plush machine,
whose barrel dehisced on hidden hinges.
Pasiphaë needed to know how it felt
inside the cow: Close your eyes,
old Daedalus, or let them browse
the moonless billows’ black roughage.
Daedalus guarded his gaze in his hands,
and his heels described a half circle
as Pasiphaë’s robe rustled downward,
and her bangles knelled and her nipples burgeoned
and her maids eased her into the cow
and closed the barrel. She breathed freely.
Hatred urged him to hoist the tail
and skewer the false through the feigned vagina,
but he didn’t diverge from the revenge he had planned.
See what good my secrets will do you
or your hot daddy! Daedalus pushed
a button broaching the bleached chine,
and a brazen spike sped from the brisket
and impaled the queen, who quenched the dry
guts with her blood and cut ichor.
The hoofs clattered, but the cow stood tall.
Pasiphaë moaned as her maids wailed.
Some endeavored to set her free,
but the brazen spike had bolted her in.
The others grabbed the engineer
and shoved him out the unshuttered window,
but Athena defended the falling man,
whose legs collapsed a feathered lozenge
while his arms made air an infinite staircase
and white barbs supplanted his peppery bristles
except where blackness bisected the lores.
His vision bulged as his brain dwindled,
and he couldn’t remember what to call his boy
or which of them invented, that wood-cutter,
or that Minos was a fool, or that he missed Athens.
He swung away from the sea and flew
to Mount Ida, an open-air
necropolis, whose crags hoarded
the distilled bones his stomach craved.