to telling them their ship would run aground
right off Lebinthos, teasing fractal bays.
Once they got her floating, Hupakoë’s
skull bashed on black rocks, and the ship’s hull split.
He never saw how well the future fit
the poet’s prophecy. The bitterness
of getting older didn’t fail to oppress
the oppressor, who enjoyed his power less.
When foreign kings no longer feared his name,
Minos began to fear that Apollo’s son
brave Miletus (the youth whose charms had won
the king’s affections a few years before)
would both begin and win a civil war.
Either through love or fear or laziness
Minos declined to banish Miletus.
The pious youth, as proud of Deïone
as of his father, scored the healing sea,
and put ashore in Asia, where he founded
a city that long bore his name, surrounded,
unlike dehiscent Knossos, with high walls.
So long impervious to suitors’ calls
to share your body, Miletus, you strolled
along Maeander’s fickle banks, which fold
backward, resembling the corridors
Daedalus built to keep the Minotaur’s
horns out of public view. That architect
required luck and all his intellect
to enter the labyrinth and find a route
from its wavering axis to the lone way out.
The Minotaur was weeping out of sight
when Minos reconstructed his appetite
for the queen’s bed, whose linen nine months later
welcomed a shrill and bloody decorator,
Glaukos, who crowned upon its twisting rucks:
many will suffer when a fat king fucks.
The labyrinth perverted Knossos: docks
crisscrossed the harbor like an upturned box
of kindling, and what helped the casual fisher
threatened to make a pauperizing scissure
in every merchant’s hull; the marketplace
multiplied stalls until there was no space
between them, and they cooped up odors sure
to daunt a recreational haggler;
the palace, once an undivided hall,
became a complex in whose muralled sprawl
a boy could lose himself. Pasiphaë
let Glaukos wander while she faced the sea
and wept the orange out of aching eyes
and tried to feel the seminal surprise
of the white bull’s opening the wizened blue.
Her unremunerated retinue
lost track of Glaukos one day while he rolled
a ball named Sminth. Though someone should have told
the boy that ball was not a real mouse,
if he was like his father, then to douse
the boy’s delusion would be suicide;
no Cretan tethered honesty to pride.
At noon that father came to chew a gray
discus of beef upon a gilded tray
as was his habit, but he startled all
the waiting slaves by asking them to call
Glaukos to the table. No one knew
where he had gone, a fault the hitherto
indifferent father rushed to castigate:
when all else failed, he knew that he was great
again if he could swing down his clenched fist
and see the queen’s slaves lift their chins and twist
between red pillars, while the guards who’d kicked
the stools from underbeneath the women flicked
spit from their eyes and almost made the king
laugh with their mimicry of wriggling,
then joined the soldiers rummaging the palace
to find the son and skirt the father’s malice.
But rummaging turned up no hideaway,
and Minos had to send Hupakoë
to Delphi for an oracle to bore
holes in the ignorance too near to ignore.
Then harvest crammed the Cretan granaries,
and in a month or two the bays might freeze,
and they’d be stuck in Phocis till almost spring
with nothing but the Pythia’s babbling
and chilblained shepherd boys to pass the time.
But saying No to Minos was a crime.
Crossing the stormy Archipelago
proved easier than courting the undertow
of royal paranoia. Minos guessed
the queen regarded one less orange crest
streaking her sight no reason for real grief.
Her mourning magnified his disbelief
as Minos waited for Hupakoë
to tell him where the prince’s body lay.
Did she already know? Was that a smirk
wrinkling her black veil’s openwork?
Minos decided that he ought to die, / Minos decided that the queen must die,
but wondering how best to satisfy
this obligation stayed his stubby hand
until Hupakoë toed Cretan sand
and told them what the Pythia declared:
the day when light and darkness evenly shared
the time between one sunrise and the next,
yokels would fear their cattle could be hexed
and bear an even odder herbivore;
whoever came up with the metaphor
that best described the freak would be the one
who’d find the body of the king’s lost son.
After the equinox, a cowherd came
to Knossos with the calf that gave him fame
(although this poem will not preserve his name).
At dawn the calf was white, by noon maroon,
and by dusk darker than the sweetest prune.
Summoned by Minos, the Athenian engineer
didn’t expect the crux of his career
awaited him at court. Although he viewed
the calf from every angle, no wit ensued.
After a day of watching Daedalus
watch the calf and take superfluous
measurements, Minos told him, That’s enough!
If you’re so smart, this shouldn’t be so tough.
Why can’t you come up with one metaphor?
But dazzled by the morphing calf, the more
he stared the more he stuttered, and the king
did not restrain himself from mimicking
the man who’d fled the home of oratory.
It was an Argive who would win the glory
the Athenian took for granted: Polyeidos,
the bard who gave the queen her day-to-day dose
of sad songs, asked permission to propose
a metaphor. Speak up, if not, who knows
how long we’ll have to wait for D-d-d-
d-daedalus to prove Calliope
hasn’t entirely deserted him.
A metaphor is not a synonym—
something this reject cannot comprehend.
Argive, proceed. I hope you don’t pretend
to know more than you can deliver us,
or you’ll wind up worse off than Daedalus.
The bard spoke: Lord, this multicolored calf
is a mulberry. The king’s garrotted laugh,
which no one standing there had heard before,
confirmed the bard had found the metaphor.
Pasiphaë concealed a smile beneath
her left hand, while the Athenian ground his teeth—
a failed attempt to clot his runny eyes.
Excellent work! I won’t forget your prize,
but first you have to find where Glaukos is.
The harper’s hands, arrayed with calluses,
received three objects from the plush-palmed king:
a sword, an unplumed helmet, and a ring
of keys. He’s probably nearby, so you
should track down places that my retinue
have overlooked in their moronic haste.
If nothing turns up, Glaukos must have chased
Sminth in the labyrinth. You could get gored—
the reason for the helmet and the sword.
Because of dopey Daedalus, you must wait
to begin searching. May dawn lead you straight
to my poor prince! Remember, bard: you’ve raised
my hopes. It’s too late now to fail unfazed.
The palace occupied its western edge
with a neglected garden. Unmown sedge
cuffed fishponds where carp rarely came to grief
since Minos made it wrong to not eat beef.
The bard’s heels burst each algae rind in vain:
no lost prince rotted on the graveled tain.
The bard crawled under every bush for naught:
thorned shade belied the hiding place he sought.
The bard then checked the vine-choked sheds where hoes,
rakes, pails, and lichened shovels taught repose
to spiders linking them with lasting threads.
He liked this place: the polymorphous dreads
that marked attendance on the queen harassed
him less here, and, to his surprise, the blast
of royal irritations quit his ears,
replaced by breezes, birdsong, and the tears
dripped by the Minotaur. The bard came close
to pastoral, forgetting his morose
mission to find the king’s presumed-dead son.
He walked along a wall where moss had spun
a mural that abstained from imitation.
Buzzing broke through his idle exploration:
a swooping owl scattered bees and sipped
old rain along the threshold of a crypt
that bore no letters in its verdigris
to sieve its tenant out of sheer decease.
The owl looked the intruder in the face,
screeched, and launched a solitary race
toward the sky in which she disappeared.
Returning bees amassed a second beard
on Polyeidos. He recalled the ring
that dangled bits and bows, but opening
the cellar door transformed his grounded knees
into sore sundials as he plied the keys,
none of which would turn inside the wards
(tempting the bard to break them with the sword’s
tip, though the king might call it vandalism)
except the last he inserted. Lacking chrism
the cellar door screeched louder than the owl
as Polyeidos lifted it. The foul
air scurried up his nose and spun
its gagging webs inside him, while the sun
beamed on a failure of posterity:
hanging headlong in honey, the absentee
showed Polyeidos nothing but the feet
that rotted so the mouth could steal a treat.
They broke off when the bard pulled Glaukos out
and viscid orange hair dispelled all doubt.
The vat preserved the boy as though he’d drowned
moments, not months, before. The gnawing sound
of bees took on a different timbre: flies
rushed in the cellar to collectivize
the hoarded honey, and while most preferred
the open vat, its recent inmate lured
a multitude. The bard bore Glaukos home
adorned with flies and chips of honeycomb.
While Minos wept, Pasiphaë directed
slaves to clean the body and detected
many small wounds in which she rubbed her balm.
Daedalus had restored his old aplomb
and started to design the prince’s tomb,
but Minos knew that hubris leads to doom
only because most men give up too soon.
No one will bury him. He’s as immune
to death as I am, or I’ll make him so.
The gods delighted in my overthrow
of city after city when I beat
all Greece into submission. Death won’t cheat
me now—the gods will always side with Crete!