Sidling north, the wind accelerated
a chill that coursed through corpses decorated
with withered seaweed, though the living sweated
no less profusely till they splashed the fetid
gulf at whose brink the Cretan oars hung still
as rowers marked the men they hoped to kill.
Down to the ships! a captain hollered right
before his nape received an arrow bite.
One rostrum almost gored Megaran sand:
King Minos spiderwebbed his carefully tanned,
but pale-eyed mask and pouted at the walls,
which seemed to mock his island’s porous halls.
The home advantage hummed a palinode:
Megara’s bravest tapped their life, which flowed
in purple aureoles around the hulls
that once curled roots in Ida far from gulls
and salt and blood. The Cretans burned the dead,
erected tents, and baked their swinish bread.
When torchlight stained the gulf and wine exchanged
abysses, Cretans marked time with deranged
fantasies of rape and robbery.
None of them knew the gates’ immunity:
all hope of breaching them would groom despair
so long as Nisos kept his purple hair.