Unable to say no or endure the scorn
they’d earn for siding with the cruel unborn,
the bard ran off, leaving their lyre behind
to string the silence of a distraught mind.
After a day spent cowering in brome,
moonlight dripped her muddy footfalls home.
Her lyre fueled the hearth, a waste of heat.
The demigod’s fists hadn’t ceased to beat
the womb he’d never rupture; his precocious
lungs had made her pregnancy ferocious
but could not end it on his terms: he needed
the blood, which, loathing him, had speeded
out of a distant cervix. Ash usurped
the lyre’s yoke, and fading embers slurped
the bard’s last tears when Scylla’s belly stilled.
The moon suffused the fog, which twilight chilled.
Heels in their hands, a hoe blade levelling
their neck, the bard pulled Scylla past the ring
of sarsens to the burial ground and tore
a grave and hummed a dirge and swabbed the gore
and mud defiling her beloved guest
whose corpse, at least, had found what passed for rest—
though if the princess knew, before she died,
there’d be no pyre, she would be horrified.
Arriving early, Eos tinged the pi
a pinker gray but couldn’t nullify
her grandson’s death. The bard was trembling
as though they had become a lyre string.
Eos let their triune nails tread grass
and made two cones of keratin amass
above their nostrils and above their eyes.
Their latticed skin began to winterize,
exuding pelage in homage to dawn
that reddened their proliferating brawn.
Raw grass beckoned, and the dumb bard chewed
with a relish halted only when they rued
decades of insipid mutton meals:
delicious culms dipped on their dainty heels.
The fattening bard grazed farther every day,
but always made it home by dusk and lay
on Scylla’s grave, where grass would not soon sprout.
When a shepherd, napping off a drinking bout,
awoke to see her bloodless cones pass by
or when the corner of a ploughman’s eye
caught her shadowing his field, he fled
in fear he minimized in what he said
to halfwit children round the hearth that night.
Attican peasants wouldn’t have taken flight,
and if the monster killed them, friends would race
each other for the chance to interlace
its entrails with their arrows. The islanders,
by contrast, raced their sheep to hide in furze
when far-flung thunder fizzed. The bard survived
a dismal winter easily and thrived
come spring, but summer did not slaughter fools:
the coat she couldn’t shed conducted pools
of sweat beneath her feet. The scarcity
of shade compelled exhausting crawls from tree
to spring and back. One brazen noon she fainted
and sprawled out still and prone, an ulcer painted
on an absinthe stain. The cowards tiptoed near,
and each one closed his eyes to throw his spear.
The bard’s blood spritzed their heels, which turned
again when all the thrashing ceased. They yearned
to taste strange meat and divvied up the bard,
whose bits soon filled his neighbors’ pots or charred
on sagging spits, deferring the demise
of sheep. Months afterward the greatest prize
turned out to be her ruddy pelage, worn
by the heroes who slew monstrous Doublehorn.
Dying, they gave their coats to concubines
or favorite sons, who sung their praise with lines
that violated truth and vexed the ear—
or so their lost bard would’ve said. Their bier:
the bluestone on whose top they heaped their bones.
Dawn bleached the skull until it matched the cones.