he probably wouldn’t notice; if he did,
one strophe’s provocation could be hid
by its antistrophe’s ingratiation.
But truth can wander into imagination,
and Polyeidos sang about how things
might’ve gone differently. He saw the king’s
head overlap the statue’s head, then sung
about a newborn two-faced god who swung
a purple lock and welcomed Minos in
Megara at last. The scalped king’s daughter’s skin
was too tanned for his taste, but Minos brought
her back to Knossos, on a trireme fraught
with gold and jewels, to be his second queen.
Pasiphaë had yet to wean
Asterion when Minos celebrated
his victory and had them separated.
Minos employed the world’s best engineer
to make his wife’s horned bastard disappear
deep in a copious network of corridors
whose bending walls would start to look like floors
to anyone who wandered there for long:
even the bricks would wander, like a song
without refrain or like the Phrygian river
who frustrates boatmen seeking to deliver
punctual cargo: Maeander flows for fun,
backward and forward; his currents rarely run
from source to sea directly but loop back
doodling many a marshy cul de sac—
Daedalus made the maze so difficult
that it was necessary to consult
his blueprints for the engineer to find
a way out of the prison he designed,
in which the Minotaur patrolled the mortar
joints for the culms he craved. His mother, daughter
of Helios, was locked inside her tower,
where she retained a little bit of power.
Each of her human children were permitted
to visit, since Deucalion was dim-witted,
Phaedra, feckless, and her sister hated
the queen so fiercely Minos speculated
she’d shun her mother till her funeral.