the funeral rites he refused to attend.
Sophia conveyed the invader’s ash
to Crete, and the queen’s courtesy
allowed the Megarans to leave alive.
Pasiphaë measured her mourning right.
How unhappy she’d have been if herds had never
grazed Ida! A grave awaited
the king’s body, but ash was all
the barbaric Megarans had brought home,
and ash can’t play with sepulchral toys
or admire the jewels mining shadows.
Pasiphaë wailed when a widow ought,
and furrowed her breasts with bright fingers
while Helios licked her delated nipples.
The marchers reached the mausoleum
and rested the urn in the red larnax—
a violation of liturgy
that would’ve seemed an insufferable outrage
if the people hadn’t hated Minos.
The Minotaur watched from his mother’s tower
as Ariadne, his eldest sibling,
weeping her rage in the row of mourners,
watched his horns weaning the sill.
Daedalus noted her discontent,
but wasn’t impatient to put it to work.
Dribs and drabs of the doomed armada
returned to Crete, and their crews lay prone
before the queen, who acquitted them of treason
and sent them weeping to their wives’ bosoms
though Ariadne urged her mother
to kill those cowards for cutting and running.
The queen received her subjects’ love,
and they started to find Asterion cute,
and they ceased expecting Hupakoë
to reappear and purge Knossos.
The armada’s defeat was the merchants’ boon:
Cretan commerce crested the sea
from Herakleion to Ilium.
Thirteen moons after Minos died,
his widow announced that the name gilding
the lintel of every entrance in Crete
would no longer needle their eyes.
His colossus yielded yawning soles.
Divided in torques, it revisited
the fire that had coupled its copper and tin
and reemerged as railings and tripods,
the finishing touches on the temple the queen
built to perform her father’s rites.
Before Daedalus fled to Crete,
none of the king’s mechanics could cast
colossi that wouldn’t warp when they cooled.
But the pride he took in his precious technique
didn’t impair the pleasure of watching
the brazen Minos dismantled and melted.
Ariadne couldn’t curse Helios,
but her veiled chamber diverted him
from his granddaughter’s begrieving dreams.
When summer came, she couldn’t sleep
through the whole duration of his high parade,
so she wore the night the world’s tilted
axis denied her each afternoon.
Pasiphaë chided her sullen child:
Molt this crow-like mantle, my dear.
It’s a sign that you’re not as smart as you think.
Prolonged mourning is illogical:
if they didn’t someday die, then fathers
would be redundant and their daughters would be slaves
to the toothless fossils that would fill the world.
But Ariadne was unpersuaded:
It’s easy, mother, to dismiss your husband’s
humiliating death and reduction to dust:
Helios never renounces burning.
Pasiphaë yanked a single hair
breaking free from the braid helix
that ruddled her daughter’s downcast head:
Your rags guzzle reeking sweat.
Don’t act like a moron. It’s midsummer!
Go take a bath and terminate
this infantile attempt to prove
you loved Minos more than I did.
The engineer watched Ariadne trudge
off to her rooms, and he realized
his plot should rival her robes’ ripeness.
The evening cool kindled a scheme:
walking around the west garden,
the loneliest part of the palace, he saw
a gallery, whose red pillars’
receding cypress framed Phaedra
leaning forward and looking down
at an unseen man singing his catch
and the sea’s havoc, consoled by the breasts
looming above her laced corset.
The next evening the engineer
returned and saw the same deadlock:
a scalloped voice scaling the wall
on a lyre’s rungs—yet the lowest her flounces
could drop was higher than his hand could reach.
Daedalus caught the cork that would float
his plot’s net on the night’s ripples.
He knew someday the notes, drawings
and prototypes he retained since he finished
the king’s colossus would come in handy.
He made a suit that mimicked the king’s
flaccid contours and culminated
in a mask as elastic as living flesh
though less orange than light ochre.
He instructed his son how to stitch him inside
and to extricate him. They crouched in a cabin
cluttered with rakes, cobwebs, and pails,
and when dusk weeded the west garden,
the boy wrapped erroneous flesh
around Daedalus, who doused himself
in secret sweat and pursued the song
that compensated for his sunken eyes.
Phaedra heard him heaving steps,
and her screech muted her mural lover,