One timid impulse drained the reservoir
of loyalty the conqueror had acquired
through promises and spoils. His captain squired
the panting king, who half hung from his neck,
watching Cretan cowards scramble on deck
and row to sea without him. Others, more
valiant or foolish, spurned the saving oar
and drove their spears right through Megara’s gate
to loot and conquer or to accelerate
their deaths. But many Cretans, unimpressed
by their king’s howled threats, merely stood abreast,
facing the city they wouldn’t throw away
their lives to raid, yet fearing a display
of active cowardice. Megara’s warriors—
most unaware their king was dead—roared slurs
at their almost conqueror and rushed his addled
countrymen. Meanwhile Scylla, who still straddled
the invaders and the invaded, begged the god
to save her Minos, but the duple nod
declined too late: Hupakoë had taken
all the arrows aimed at his forsaken
leader until he splashed in the Saronic
Gulf and died, forgetting the mnemonic
Minos Incarnates Noxious Olympian Sludge.
Though Minos kicked, the captain could not budge.
Wading waist-deep, Minos assailed the breeze
with taunts and threats too far away to seize
the ears of his onetime loyal subjects, who
couldn’t row back to shore in time to undo
his ruin anyway. Their dipping oars
rhymed the loosed arrows teaching the loser war’s
calligraphy with his own blood, which swirled
diffusing graphemes in the saline world
about to claim him. Scylla’s god beheld
the silent creatures in the tide that swelled
around the whining king. Five arrows flexed,
grooving the surface of his now unsexed
but nippled test, whose needles ousted eyes
they didn’t need: this echinoid demise
made him all eye. His mouth refused to yelp
as his brain waned. His anus pined for kelp.
The four-eyed god picked up the prickly orb
and sniffed its nerve ring while the sand absorbed
the tears that Scylla’s hurry sprayed. She said:
Give us a love-nest down that watershed.
Minos and Scylla dwelled inside a creek
ripped by the gulf and flourished without Greek,
the former smoldering in clouds of milt,
which the latter, sauntering on silt,
punctured with eggs: vicarious interaction
allowed what she’d called love to gain some traction.
They didn’t know the new god’s tricks enraged
the Olympians. His sea-change disengaged
Europa’s eldest son from sovereignty
but hadn’t quelled his genealogy.
When lightning fried the new god in Megara,
whose white hot cinders rose, a brief tiara
upon the gulf’s wet brow, it took the chill
out of the creek and tingled every quill
on the faceless lovers, who were unaware
of what was happening and could not care.