as he himself admits. Lord Minos, I
devised the tomb where your sweet prince will lie,
and I know all the body’s mysteries,
the quirks of life and death. Your Highness, please
don’t take the Kuretes too literally:
there’s no one fitter for this task than me.
Minos replied: I ordered to you speak
not long ago, but you were just too weak.
Now you’re so fluent. You’ll boss around a king?
If jealousy’s a cure for stuttering,
what will cure Athenian insolence?
Daedalus rediscovered reticence.
Minos took a gilded slipper set
with sapphires off his chalky foot and let
Daedalus feel them with his bony face.
The floor’s mosaic dolphins bore a trace
of that rebuke: white chips where blue stones bounced.
Seeing Daedalus publicly denounced
was nothing new for Naukrate’s son, but this
was the first time he saw the king dismiss
him bleeding on the slaves who dragged him out.
Life’s rarest opportunities may sprout
between the fissures of near-lethal force.
With all eyes following a flapping course
from Minos to his father, Icarus
let their distraction veil his treasonous
filching of a sapphire off the floor.
A week had passed since Polyeidos bore
the dead prince home. Without his honey shroud,
Glaukos stank, but no one said aloud
what every nostril clenched to minimize.
Minos would have his feast despite the flies
whose buzzing bassline linked the bouts of cheer
commanded by the king, who liked to sneer
at frightened toadies he compelled to toast
him while he listened gnawing on his roast.
He danced to mock their drunken lethargy.
Just before daybreak, Minos put his knee
on the bard’s neck and woke him with a choke.
The cellar’s darkness hastened to revoke
the sunlight harrying the bard’s raw head.
Not even his rival could explain how red
eyes could convert flat black to convex grays.
The gilded pall sustained his gaze
while stray flies exercised his ears,
but though the prince’s bones might tell the years
there was no way to mark diurnal time,
so who knows when he saw the serpent climb
the dais bolstering the prince’s bier
one step above cold dirt. Whatever fear,
disgust, or fascination glided
into the bard, his borrowed sword divided
the serpent’s body from his head so quick
he didn’t give the prince a single lick.
After what felt like hours in the murk,
the serpent’s wife beheld the stranger’s work.
She slithered off and came back with a spray
of bluish berries in her mouth. She lay
them on the base of her beloved’s head.
The bard then watched a fresh green body thread
the esophageal eye. The couple scrolled
around each other and revealed that cold-
blooded or not, they knew what ardor was.
Those earless lovers gathered the flies’ buzz
for fanfare as they glided to their lair,
leaving behind the power to repair
the worst that life can do to living things.
The green leaves rustled like aspiring wings
when Polyeidos took the spray and placed
it on the head death still had not defaced.
The berries rattled, and the boy arose
and tried and failed to peel the gilded clothes
and tumbled from the bier and wept and screeched
Pasiphaë! When that disgraced name reached
the king’s ears, Glaukos was officially
alive, and Minos told the slaves to free
the boy from his remodeled crypt. The spray
turned brown in noon’s unmitigated day.
Stuttering joy, the king embraced his heir
and dug terse fingers in his orange hair.
But Glaukos considered his comeback incomplete:
no one explained what happened to his feet.
Slaves carried him while Minos spent his breath
claiming that he alone could conquer death.
The megaron received them with much pomp,
but undead Glaukos now perceived the swamp
frothing behind pink frescoes and pale bricks.
Although his legs were like two shipwrecked wicks,
the boy’s imagination took him far.
Grinning between a germinating scar,
Daedalus occupied his usual seat
at the table piled with over-roasted meat
hoping the king had relaxed his memory
now that he repossessed posterity.
But Daedalus was wrong. The king’s head rose
from his emptied platter to disclose
an altered plan. Since people say you’re weak,
D-Daedalus, and can’t speak proper Greek,
you won’t be teaching my boy anymore.
Since Polyeidos helped me to restore
the prince’s life, he’ll guide his education.
Argive, it’s time to enjoy my approbation:
take thrice your weight in women or in gold.
Then Polyeidos carefully controlled