had learned the rudiments of sorcery
from her Aeaean sister, and a spell
she still remembered served her purpose well.
To cast the spell, she needed one of her
children to bleed, though just enough to stir.
Deucalion was a frequent visitor,
who one day drank so much of mother’s wine
(she kept on toasting him) her hollow tine
could bleed him while he snored. She poured the bowl
over a wax dildo daubed with coal:
Minos, next time you penetrate that tart
let your semen imitate your heart!
Minos unwittingly obeyed: that night
Scylla moaned beneath him, and her fright
barely surpassed his when her womb filled
with scorpions. Their poison quickly killed
their second host, but not before their claws
shredded her insides. Minos knew the cause
of his bereavement, and Pasiphaë
suffered from deictic ambiguity:
whichever woman lay with him received
the same defertilizing seed. He grieved
for Scylla moderately—just enough
to season his revenge. Expecting rough
treatment, the concubines whom Minos picked
couldn’t conceive what horrors he’d inflict
to test his curse. The impatient scorpions clicked
within his loins to toll the queen’s last hour.
Pointing his pinky index at her tower,
the king said, Bring that tart to Scylla’s bower.
Four goons trudged up the marble stairs, which pined
for the time before these greedy mammals mined
the Apennines, when it was dark and dry,
free from sea breezes and the flashing sky.
When the goons dragged Deucalion and the queen
down the stairway, what did their thuds mean?
Did the stairs applaud Pasiphaë’s demise,
or did they resonate to scandalize
the impending murder the only way they could?
Helios was distracted. Minos stood
within the bower, whose locked door his son
would pound in vain until the deed was done.
With each limb held down by a separate guard,
the queen was hoisted with her own petard.
Deucalion mourned his mother’s death with wine.
His drunkenness compelled him to recline,
one night, on parapets. An owl hooted
in the west garden, and the sound diluted
his sleep enough to make Deucalion roll
off the high wall. Unable to control
his daughters or produce another heir,
the king found out revenge can reap despair.
The Cretans wondered what was happening
inside the palace, yet, somehow, the king
kept it all secret. Meanwhile, winter cursed
his enemies: when Boreas traversed
the Thracian mountains, Attica became
a deadly place, though he conveyed the same
coldness he usually did. The new god’s name
had never plumbed Greek ears. They couldn’t pray
or sacrifice to him. Rich people lay
beneath vast heaps of rugs and woolen clothes
beside their hearths. They weren’t the ones who froze
when Scylla’s imp forbid all doors to close:
children escaped their mothers’ blue embraces
and shook to death outside their huts. Two faces,
no pity: sorrow’s always been the meat
of gods, but Doorway didn’t take a seat
on Olympus, so he never learned good table
manners. Life in Crete was less unstable:
cows bled every day in secret rites
performed by Minos without acolytes,
so he could own the god’s name. Cretans closed
their doors at will, and their king exposed
his curse to few and Doorway’s name to none.
Rumors reached Attica before the sun
had made his briefest journey that in Crete
doors still permitted homes to hold their heat.
Many set sail to take part in the tyrant’s
unearned hoard of warmth. Though most aspirants
dug sea graves, enough got through to enrage
Cretans who found it hard to disengage
from what their wartime king once taught them: hate
the Greeks. Others were prone to celebrate
the refugees, who found their ruddy hosts
surprisingly attractive. The northern coast’s
shallows clogged with shipwrecks. Minos ordered
Daedalus to fix the pitifully unbordered
coast with a wall adorned with thorns to impede
the shivering cowards. Daedalus agreed,
went home to draw schematics, closed his doors,
and wept laughing. Threatening a war’s
one way to raise funds: the Atticans would pay
double their old tribute to defray
the wall’s cost, Minos claimed—or else they’d see
the Cretan fleet again. The misery
Doorway imposed recurred each year. The wall,
defying furtive snickerers, stood tall,
but only a few stadia north of Knossos,
then abruptly ended—a proboscis
ripped off a lithic beast and left to bleach
in sun and guano. Though it marred the beach,
few refugees would see the wall, which loomed
largely for Cretan eyes. The king assumed
locals would lynch whoever made it past
the wall, but since the refugees surpassed
Cretans in many skills considered boring
by Minos (who neglected them) abhorring
the Greeks became a challenge once they made
their competence apparent. Most Greeks stayed
after Doorway’s prohibition ended:
so little sacrificial smoke ascended
from Greece to Olympus in the winter, Zeus,
lazy except when trying to seduce
the weak and innocent, agreed at last
to appease his whining wife and heirs and blast
Doorway with ozone. When the new god stopped
smoking, Apollo cleaned his wounds and sopped
his flesh in an ambrosia bath, which bubbled
all the way to Latium where the doubled
coma persisted for hundreds of years. The cave
where Hermes lay the winged tub gave
two views of the Tiber when the god awoke,
having no memory of the thunderstroke
or his own name. I need to take this poem
from its Roman exile to its Cretan home,
but if I can’t invoke transition’s god
to execute this narrative glissade,
how could I write how Cretan Greeks surmised
Minos’s love of boys had jeopardized
his dynasty, which lacked male heirs; how native
Cretans in Knossos, who despised creative
foreigners, blamed bad harvests on the Greeks,
who’d brought them mathematics and techniques
for casting metal into idols; how
temples, which the king would not allow
in Knossos, reared their columns secretly
throughout the countryside, where loyalty
to Minos weakened as Greeks interbred
prolifically with natives till most red
teats plumped the cheeks of pinker progeny;
how when the Athenian Seven crossed the sea
they did not feed Asterion but wandered
regions ignored by Minos; how he squandered
dwindling spoils to extend the wall around
Knossos—too late, too little; how the sound
of rebel peasants rushing through the gap
drove Minos to the maze without a map;
how Theseus, commander of the rebels,
filled a bag with green marble pebbles
fetched from a pond in the king’s west garden
and felt his manhood and his heart harden
while Phaedra begged him to show leniency
to Minos; how her sister, though a bee
stung her right earlobe, made no sound but stood
watching the pair behind a pile of wood
drying beneath a toolshed’s vine-webbed eave
until she heard his oath and saw him leave;
how Theseus dropped pebbles as he explored
the maze alone; how sweat ran down his sword,
anticipating blood; how he got bored
with dead ends and the corridors they made
him go down twice; how though he was afraid
when he turned a chipped corner and first saw
Asterion on tiptoe plucking straw
from upper bricks, he ordered him to say
where he would find the tyrant’s hideaway;