that will enable you to leap and run
as much as other boys. It isn’t fun
to study all the time. You want to know
a secret? When I came here years ago
your sister Ariadne’s feet were twisted
and swollen: a shameful defect that resisted
the efforts of Cretan sages, but I made
a special dancing floor, which cured her feet.
If you step on that floor, it will complete
your resurrection, prince, I promise you.
Glaukos dismissed the Athenian: he knew
it was a trap though every word was true.
Glaukos no longer wished to leap and run
like other boys. The science he’d begun
to acquire made their silly games so boring.
It wasn’t long till Glaukos was exploring
the future from the present. Minos told
his family to hear the prince unfold
their future. He predicted Theseus
would be the first man Ariadne’d kiss.
He’d reach the labyrinth’s open core and 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 saw her boy hang on the same
gallows where his father 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 weary 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. His student’s ghost had flit
across the Styx. Since then, he didn’t give
himself much thought, and now would rather live
through others’ futures. Since the prince omitted
divining his own, his kiss transmitted
his science to his teacher, who thereby
discovered all the strange ways he must die
in other worlds. In one he dared to choose
thrice his weight in women, though a Muse
warned him that he’d regret it. Minos bid
his slaves to weigh him, which they promptly did.
And then he told them, Weigh Pasiphaë
together with her girls. Adultery
has made me question their paternity.
Though Phaedra gasped and Ariadne pouted
(just like the king), their mother never doubted
they would emerge unharmed from this crude prank.
They climbed upon the empty pan, which sank
to the mosaic tiles, then, lurch by lurch,
rose to the height of the octopuses’ perch:
they weighed a little less than thrice the bard.
Minos was silent (he always found it hard
to think two steps ahead), but the engineer
thought he could solve this problem and endear
himself to Minos once more: If you slice
the Argive’s arm off, then they’ll equal thrice
his new weight. Minos grinned and told the bard:
Look, Orpheus was able to discard
all of his limbs and still become the best
diviner in the world. Your harp must rest,
but that will help you concentrate on teaching
my Glaukos divination. The Argive’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 on 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.