His popping knees’ harassment disappears
midnight to midnight, the krater emptying
like the waterthief of a rhetor practicing
the speech that will delay or speed his death.
When winter makes him see his putrid breath,
and all the wine is gone, and warfare bores
his boyfriends, and our Crete-defying stores
of grain just speck the bottom of the bins,
and Famine’s patient cruelty begins,
what warrior worth his salt would waste away
for father! Since his coronation day
till now, he hasn’t even stepped outside
Megara’s narrow gates. But think how wide
Athens’ young prince has cast his fame—a fraction
of father’s age and making his inaction
seem less like peace than laziness, or worse,
like cowardice. His happiness, my curse!
And my love has conquered the Archipelago
from Kos to Pylos—not for spoils—although
he’d be a fool to shun them—but to right
a wrong that singers everywhere will cite
as a trite example of infamy: we killed
Androgeus! And even if father filled
all of their ships with gold, that’s not revenge!
Last night’s dream lover flying me to a henge
that filtered fog amid a green plateau:
that means I’ll get out soon. Just take it slow:
today, tomorrow, father could drop dead;
next month, perhaps, you’ll warm a Cretan bed.
It had to change, though not the way she hoped.
While staring at the Cretan camp, she coped
day after day with Boreas, who groped
her on the parapets but could not get
what he called love. At last, his hardening sweat
dangled from eaves before it broke and fell
under a sun too feeble to compel
Scylla to shade her eyes against the glare
that launched ground lightning through the summer air.
The Cretan birds that visited each spring
had long since gone back south. Interpreting
bird languages was what Athea learned
from her first, by far best, owner, who discerned
her love of wisdom. When Melampus died,
his eldest son, to whom he had denied
his wisdom, sold Athea, and she never met
her son again. The humming parapet
lured many kinds of birds, who usually
spoke about boring things, like how the sea
was warming more each year, but one reported
that Crete’s queen loved a white bull, that she courted
him in a wooden cow, and that her son
had two horns and two hooves but only one
hand and foot. Athea couldn’t say
whether birds could lie, but there’s no way
this story was the truth—and if it was,
Scylla believed it had to be because