water for air, and drowned a heron’s chicks,
confusing tiny Mageras with the Styx.
The new wall cracked and fell. Pasiphaë
tackled her son and took the masonry
that did not care which skull it comminuted.
Hindered no longer, Helios saluted
the cave’s entrance, but never guessed its rubble
entombed his daughter. Breathing through chinks, the double-
breed pulled her out. But by then Helios
was favoring the west slope with his gloss
and didn’t see him soak his daughter’s breast
with tears and blood. Asterion thought it best
to find a priest and bring him back to burn
his mother on a pyre. The taciturn
mountain dissented with an aftershock
that echoed unsaid sentences: Don’t mock
the worms with fire. Leave your mother here.
Trust the worms. They’ll make her disappear
the slow and proper way. The maggot dance
is subtle, but a fire’s happenstance
wriggling’s an insult, and the charring bier
will hurt the poor girl. Leave your mother here.
He ran down slopes whose plane and oak once played
their counterpoint of leaves to Ida’s grade,
but now could only hum a dittany dirge,
since Minos, manufacturing an urge
to conquer Greece, clear-cut so much of Crete
for grazing space and planks to build a fleet.
So nothing could impede Asterion’s view
of what first looked like a pale grey bird that flew
close to the ground, but bounding up the slope
with the nimbleness of an antelope,
it proved to be a white bull, dabbed with mud
and fledged with darts whose blue wounds welled no blood.
Lifting the boy upon his nose, the bull
settled him on his back. With his lungs full
of mountain air, the bull retraced his course
at greater speed. Asterion’s remorse
dissolved between two terrors: holding tight,
he shut his eyes and shivered as the white
rush cut against the wind’s grain. Soon they reached
a village near the sea, whose women screeched
when a bovine version of a centaur crossed
their agora, where rites, which had just then lost
all sacerdotal moderation, did
Artemis homage with the rural id.
A dozen drunks rushed home to fetch their bows
and shoot the bull that jeopardized their rows
of pampered grain, for when the white bull learned
he’d fucked a hairless biped whose flesh churned
against the splinters of a fake cow’s womb,
he vowed his outraged hoofs would spell the doom
of every fissured thing—or so they’d heard
by virtue of the viral spoken word.
They strung their bows too late: the bull had gone
from green to brown to yellow, and his brawn
seemed to nullify his weight,
forcing the briny ceiling to undulate
beneath and not above the hide whose candor
had decreed Europa’s fattest son commander
of Crete. The bull, like all good signs, was meant
to be discarded when the god’s intent
was clearly understood, but Minos hated
to kill the prodigy that consummated
his dominance: It can’t be right to burn
a gift. I don’t want him to think I spurn
his generosity. My second-best
bull is a treasure fit to manifest
my gratitude. And anyway, Poseidon
having quit Olympus to reside in
the airless abyss, can’t smell the difference
between grilled meat and kindled frankincense,
so how can he contest the excellence
of what I offer him? Poseidon kept
his rage on hold. While Athens’ women wept
into the wounds Cretan plunderers made,
Poseidon sent a horse, who gently neighed
beneath the queen’s high window: Long ago
the sea produced a lover to overthrow
your self-sufficiency. You loved that bull.
It marked the first and last day life felt full
of happiness. Remember how they braided
your hair with purple ribbons, while he waded
along the glaring shore. The wind inflated
your faux-Sidonian skirt. Infatuated
even before the acolytes settled you
upon his back, you thrilled when auloi blew,
when rhoptra roared and goosebumps scaled your legs
and incense hummed and wine bowls aired their dregs
and the tide stuttered and your father burned
himself asleep and everybody yearned
to see, if not to touch, Europa—you!
And Minos was too cowardly to pursue
his callow lusts and had no retinue.
Pasiphaë awoke and yearned to walk
fields on all fours. Her girlfriends didn’t balk
when she commanded them to escort her up
the lush foothills where the oxen tup
green-mouthed heifers. Her girlfriends loved to sing
dressed like shepherdesses, and witnessing
the queen crawl toward the multicolored ring
of heifers prompted giggles, which their amorous
sovereign ignored. But mooing isn’t glamorous,
and soon they realized Pasiphaë
was serious in her insanity.
They tried, and failed, to get her to go home
when her mouth’s mortar ran green foam.
Give me the white one, Aphrodite, just
one time. My stipule needs his tepal thrust.
Great goddess, you’ll see golden oysters glare
upon your altars if you grant this prayer.
But the goddess had so many beaus to squire her,
and the bull ignored his sad unhoofed admirer.
At last, the queen consented to go home.
They helped her up the lofty catacomb.
She wanted nothing but to weep alone,
and they complied, relieved to hear her moan
in such a human tone. And as the key
turned in the lock, they thought Pasiphaë
would soon regain her wits. Once Minos left
to conquer Athens, Knossos was bereft
of virile men, but old boys grow so quick,
and one of them would surely do the trick.
They wondered which of their new men to lend
Pasiphaë. She watched her father end
another lonely crossing, which made her think
how great it’d be to watch the armada sink—