for boosting memory. The past would cloy
the prince’s mind, unable to deploy
enough imagination to exercise
his nascent skills or even to surmise
future events as well as Icarus could.
Taking advantage of his fatherhood,
Daedalus baked an addled honey cake,
which Icarus was overjoyed to take
as a hot present to his royal friend.
One swallow was enough to put an end
to any delights Pasiphaë prepared
to divert the boy whom death had rudely spared.
Glaukos remembered how his viscous head
banged earthenware as frangible as lead.
Glaukos remembered how mother gripped
his ankles as he dipped the honey crypt.
Glaukos remembered how the naked king
leaked hook-tailed spiders from his livid thing. . . .
Glaukos remembered every worm the way
to Styx and all the antiphonic spray
careening off the hull until it beached
where neither sun- nor moon- nor starlight reached,
a gray land kindling chthonic glow,
which hangs on folk who bear no mistletoe,
shadows beyond experience who bet
on what will happen where the sun can set.
They wait for Kharon’s cargo to relay
the latest downfalls; then the losers pay
their wagers’ in worn coins. The game engrossed
Glaukos, who studied how the wisest ghost
deduced the aftermath of meager facts—
engrossed him till a sound like scutching flax
interrupted. He tried to keep his mind
on the next bet, but Kore rushed behind
and dragged him to a riverbank and held
his head beneath green current, which expelled
all memory of Hades till he bit
the honey cake. Refusing to admit
that anything was wrong, the silent prince
wept as though weeping were a facial rinse.
Minos despised his reticence almost
as much as his mute tears. Why don’t you boast
of coming back from Hades? Loser, you
won’t rule a kingdom if you can’t subdue
your childhood friends. You have no right to weep:
consider what you eat and where you sleep
while brats your age are begging for their bread
hardly out of earshot—better off dead.
The fate I spared you, all the thanks I get.
Finish your party, ingrate. I regret
making it possible. I wish I had . . .
Muttering Minos departed from his sad
scion and sadder queen. Hupakoë
followed his waddling master, and the way
the captain’s ripped calves cut through distance
metamorphosed Phaedra, whose mere existence
became a merry agony that teased
her taut imagination till she seized
the horse’s neck and galloped down the shore
diffusing Knossos in the wind’s wet roar,
the captain with his arms around her hips.
Glaukos misread her blush and quivering lips
as marks of anger. Phaedra gave the boy,
whose tears had not abated, a round toy
she’d made herself. It was her touch that stopped
his tears, and not the gift that Glaukos dropped:
its golden stiches looked like Sminth’s tall grin.
Though Ariadne could no longer win
the king’s approval of her cruelty,
she handed slippers to the amputee
and simpered: No one wants to see your feet.
But Ariadne made a quick retreat
when Phaedra uncoiled the red braid from her head
with one crisp slap. The first-born daughter thread
her way from hall to hall, for when she found
father and told him what occurred, he’d pound
that slutty bitch beneath the dolphin tiles,
translating Ariadne’s sobs to smiles.
Or so she hoped. But she was not alone
in overconfidence. It’s true, the unknown
often derives from things we know; those things,
however, dangle from so many strings
untangling them is a rare skill. Daedalus
didn’t know the boy would reminisce
about his acquisition of this skill
when dying wrapped him in an unfelt chill.
The bard announced that Glaukos had completed
his divination schooling and entreated
his family to hear him tell its fate,
which no god helped him to extrapolate.
He said a man named Theseus would come
to Crete, and Ariadne would succumb
to his charisma. Theseus would kill
Asterion, and having had his fill
of Ariadne quickly, would desert
her on a sandbar, favoring the pert
body of Phaedra, whom he’d carry home
to Athens and make his queen. But first they’d roam
from island to island, savoring the bliss
of early love and late nights. Theseus
would stop at Delos with her and encode
the secret of Asterion’s abode
by dancing like a crane. Pasiphaë
would outlive Minos, whose senility
would bleach his last years whiter than her bull.
Icarus would feel the noose’s pull
for stealing, and his father wouldn’t be
around to save him. Everyone could see
the sapphire in the boy’s now trembling palm.
Icarus wept, and Glaukos kept so calm,
and this was proof that what he’d said was true.
Minos wasn’t happy that the coup
he’d feared so long he’d feared so long in vain.
The prophecy converted his disdain
for the thief’s father into hate: You said—
you promised me!—not even you can thread
the labyrinth. How can this Theseus
just walk out with its secret? Daedalus,
you’re a disgrace. That lie was treasonous.
Naucrate watched her boy hang on the same
gallows where his father’d felt the shame
of slow and public death the day before.
Minos desired nothing anymore
except to feast in bed. Senility
had locked itself inside and gulped the key.
He was too tired not to keep his word
to Polyeidos, whom he’d once preferred
to keep on Crete forever. Glaukos stood
with the bard on the pier. The likelihood
of shipwreck was minute. Before he scaled
the bobbing gangplank and the vessel sailed
away, the teacher asked the prince to spit
in his mouth, but doing so could not transmit
the skills he’d mastered deep in honeycomb.
The bard escaped and made it safely home.