to prove he’s not a walking curse and pry
the cave’s blocked entrance with his bantam horns!
Now give my cooks fair warning: Minos scorns
all meat but beef! The king paused long enough
to see his engineer’s inverted scruff.
Then Daedalus, accompanied by hired
goons, climbed the marble stairway, which desired
nothing but home, where it was dark and dry,
spared the sea breezes and the flashing sky.
When the goons dragged Asterion and the queen
down the stairway, what did their thuds mean?
Did the white stone cheer Pasiphaë’s demise,
or did it resonate to scandalize
the impending murder the only way it could?
On days like this, it wished it were born wood
so it could burn! The captives dropped from dark
to darker as the night’s last spark
gave way to rising bricks. In the arche-dark,
hours are catachreses. They could tell
they’d been there long because their stomachs’ knell
announced each meal they skipped. Pasiphaë,
deprived of her father’s look, addressed her plea
to the slick rock: Mount Ida, honey-nymph,
you who keep the immortals’ deadly lymph
safe in their veins—ground’s ground and heaven’s crux,
who does the heavy lifting Atlas ducks
when there’s no hero watching, please forgive
our forced intrusion. Ida, let us live,
if only so your depths won’t be defiled
by our dead flesh. Asterion, the only child
I love, provokes my husband with his mere
existence. Minos and his henchmen fear
my father, so they’ve buried us alive.
Either they presupposed that you’d connive
with murder, or they didn’t stop to think
that you’d object to our rot’s lingering stink.
They didn’t even make a sacrifice.
You’re not a god to them. A pair of dice
receives much more attention back in Knossos,
where they would’ve found it easier just to toss us
off the walls in nightfall’s privacy.
If I must die, then let this creature free.
Great Ida, if you free us both, I’ll raise
an altar at your eastern foot, whose blaze
will turn that tyrant to smoke, and nobody
will dare repeating his cruel blasphemy.