diviner in the world. Your harp must rest,
but that will help you concentrate on teaching
my Glaukos divination. The poor bard’s screeching
sounded little like the singing voice
that had made the queen and her lost son rejoice.
After the second weighing, Polyeidos
(perhaps because he got an hour’s hiatus
to staunch his bleeding and to swallow wine)
sprawled in his pan, which still failed to align
with the other one. It seemed to Daedalus
The Argive’s right hand is superfluous
for teaching divination. Its removal
would probably suffice. The king’s approval
was quicker than the bard’s once nimble wit.
(By choosing women, Polyeidos split
the Muses: while some wanted him to die
for letting Zeus’s son objectify
his wife and daughters, some preferred to save
the only male in snailhead Crete who gave
their content rhythmic form. They compromised.)
At last, the royal women harmonized
with thrice the handless bard, who bled so much
he never got to feel their coital clutch.
Minos told slaves to lug the corpse outside.
They wished to give the bard a dignified
though secret funeral. Polyeidos, borne
through the west garden, where he’d gently torn
the prince’s feet, condensed into a drop
of blood, escaped his wrist, and made a pop
hitting a tiny puddle, where he condensed
again and made his eyes a crown, dispensed
with one leg and his only arm, and swam
with all the ardor in a dithyramb.
He didn’t shun the olfactory abyss
of a sniping Haptoglossa mirabilis,
silently firing fungal cells inside
the bard’s new body, where they multiplied
to reconstruct him as a cylinder.
When his exit tubes began to stir
the bloody film, new spores released their whips
and crowded through those tubes, a sinking ship’s
last open hatches. But they were the bard,
readying their bodies to bombard
unwitting rotifers. From nose to spore,
they lived the inhuman life of metaphor.