hoping that prompt abasement would avert
the death his doubled double adumbrated:
Great one, your image will be venerated
in every Cretan home when I return.
Let me atone: I’ve been too slow to learn
your name, yet laying low that blue-haired freak,
you’ve done at once what we’ve lost week after week
failing to do. I’m Minos, king of Crete,
whose men you’ve saved. Megarans always cheat
and would’ve picked us off until I beat
what their fake bards would label a retreat.
How can we show our gratitude? I fear
a hecatomb would fall short, too austere
a recompense for such a victory.
But let our spears proclaim our piety
if you’d delight in watching losers die.
The god, his straightest gaze his most awry,
kept Scylla in sight, while looking at the king.
His right mouth snapped. To watch you slaughtering
these people wouldn’t please me. I can do
much worse damage than your sweaty crew,
whose countless heads don’t add up to my two.
Now listen, jowly, this is what you’ll do:
you’ll marry her before tomorrow’s dew
has dried, and take her to that island you
like to boast about, and love your new
wife better than your old one. You will rue
this day if you don’t pay what Scylla’s due:
an ending like her daddy’s will ensue:
I’ll knot your bright scalp to his rouged blue.
He brought his left mouth close to the king’s right ear
and whispered: You’ll be able to revere
me properly, but Doorway will eat the fear
of those who must supply his name with groans.
The god then vaulted on the vocal stones
dripping patricidal overtones
on Scylla, who rejoiced in her espousal
with gasping cries conducive to arousal
but not becoming in a dead king’s only
surviving child. To die is to be lonely,
fucking’s the best alternative, and mourning
is wasted time — ideas her old slave, warning
Scylla how quick comeuppance comes, attempted
removing, but her bloody death exempted
Scylla from good advice. No timbrels clattered
during the nuptials, but a few blood-splattered
Megarans banged their shields with empty fists
(some hoping that they’d thereby slice their wrists).
Nisos attended the nuptials too: the wind,
which no bride’s preference could rescind,
spun him in acrid puffs around the guests
staring at his daughter’s dark white breasts
and knocking off the wine he left behind.
Hoarding sobriety, the groom declined
to drink: he’d rather exercise his tongue
boasting of triumphs, which remain unsung.
Before embarking on the voyage home,
Minos paraded in the hippodrome,
sat on the dead king’s bench, and gave new laws
to conquered citizens, whose loud applause
might not have been unanimously fake:
there was at least one law they’d never break:
Forget these laws to appease the two-faced god.
Such was his haste, he failed to shoot his wad
in Scylla’s loins before they rode the sea,
whose billows, lovers of polygamy,
made certain their voyage was gentle and quick.
Though the king’s mastery of arithmetic
didn’t exceed his nubby digits’ total,
a hundred bulls were felled by sacerdotal
axes on Crete’s north coast to keep a vow
Minos had made before the swordfish bow
of his ship had unsheathed in brackish spray. The wind
that brought the fleet home safely also thinned
the black smoke into a transparency
that reached the window where Pasiphaë
suckled the Minotaur for all to see.
Her gaze confirmed it was too late to flee.
An insult to forthcoming injury:
her husband didn’t lack for company,
the brown girl squatting on his brazen knee
above the shadow of his axletree.
Pasiphaë’s inhuman fornication
had cornified, a curving bifurcation.