and stalled the victory that Minos claimed
a fleeting siege would tender them. He blamed
Apollo’s priest’s erroneous divination,
said his own vows of rapid spoliation
were jokes, and what was half a year to pass
besieging enemies? The youth of grass.
The Cretans came to know each weed that quilled
Megara’s walls, but homes they’d drudged to build
in Knossos never lingered like a tune.
They heard one tower droning every noon:
Apollo once forgot a lyre there,
and the chords he strummed didn’t diffuse in the air
but clutched the blistering stones for centuries.
When the dog days made a feline breeze
feel like a tease and not a reprieve, the king’s
daughter would still unloose a murder’s wings
and perch upon the parapets and view
how many wounds the new day would accrue.
She never joined the others placing bets
on whether the Cretans would drill and volley threats
or skirmish with Megara’s guardians,
who sallied out like famished scorpions
forgetting their nocturnal bias till
dusk called the ones the sally didn’t kill
back home through gates that filtered Cretans out
whenever the defenders fled in rout.
On days the gates kept shut, the princess pitched
pebbles at the battlements, bewitched
the air with lithic tocsins, and displayed
her glistening beauty in hope it could persuade
the Cretans to forsake their canvas shade
and make a brazen clang their serenade.
On battle days not even she could hear
the tower drone for all the rattling gear,
the flyting boasts and taunts and laughs and jeers,
the howls, the crumpling shields, the crashing spears.
She memorized her enemies and yoked
their faces to the names their pride evoked.
She knew one face too well: Europa’s brat’s.
His eyeballs bulged in sallow socket fats
beyond whose pale the level pores declined—
a sunburned mask or muddled orange rind.
But if his helmet blocked his bleaching hair,
she’d say his beauty was beyond compare.
And if his forelock wagged its cranial flare,
she’d say his beauty was beyond compare.
Whether the javelin would miss or maim
the princess would applaud his awful aim.
When Minos drew the deadly fletching back,
she said he was Apollo dealing wrack.
But when his minions hauled him on his horse,
whose once-white flanks he scored with undue force
as he attempted to demoralize
his enemies, but only hurt their eyes
with his jeweled saddle, Scylla went insane
and wished she could become his horse’s mane
and saturate herself with regal sweat.
She called his slave-boy groom a vile coquette,
but he would never hear that smear: the wind,
the humming stones, and the sheer distance thinned
her clamors into treble gibberish,
whose impotence conceived a virile wish:
leave Megara, join the Cretan side,
become their leader’s last, best bride.
Delusion (also known as love) declared
the gods would treat her gently if she dared
to show her love was real: when she leapt
off the tower, the wind would intercept
her fall and glide her to the Cretan king.