but hated Scylla more. She let night smother
the red worms Helios had left behind,
before she made her panting body wind
up marble steps dreaming they were home
down in the unsunned, unmooned monochrome,
before the mattocks brought the wind and rain
and their dragging down the Apuan moraine
to the Archipelago and blinding Crete.
The queen was balanced on her window seat
when Ariadne entered. Pasiphaë’s
hatred of Scylla put her daughter at ease,
and mixed wine steadily sipped enhanced the wit
of the slanders roused by that Megaran slit.
The night almost exhausted, they agreed
there was no way to make the new queen bleed
that wouldn’t get them killed, but they would try
in future drinking sessions to belie
the possible. When Ariadne went
back down the steps, the wine’s red moonlight lent
her tread some gentleness. She didn’t vent
a single marble thud. She reached her bed
without a stumble. Somehow Scylla’s head
got in her hands and stained the throne room’s tiles,
a red sea wreathing random isles
of dryness, near whose beaches dolphins swam
beside their panting kin. An anagram
thundered. Aha, the queen said, pipes!
Then Ariadne saw her father’s tripes
pour from his wound. You murderer! arraigned
a dirty anagram while timbrels veined
hearing’s extremities. All tiles submerged,
the clicking dolphins sharked the blood that urged
filial vengeance. Ariadne’s blade
had pierced the queen when Dionysus swayed
into the carnage, which he drunkenly
mistook for part of his own liturgy.
She was more beautiful than Phaedra at last,
and the maenads cheered the god’s white blast,
each flourishing a timbrel, pipe, or fife.
Then Dionysus took her as his wife
and placed her crown in heaven so she’d glow
among the stars. Immune to vertigo,
the crown cut through the thinnest wind. Its jewels
morphed into flames the lofty darkness cools
into the constellation you can see
between the snake’s head and the laborer’s knee.