in a cave’s bright entrance, where the likelihood
he’d survive augmented. Ida’s wood
was home, he’d heard, to people who understood
life as amalgams: centaurs, satyrs, fauns.
Birds rare in Knossos warbled in the dawn’s
or dusk’s reprieve. Before he left the cave,
an image someone managed to engrave
in the high flat ceiling made him pause: a god
with a long beard, wide hat, and odd
sandals persuaded skeletons to rise
feet first from jars, above which bees or flies
hovered. To spare his craning neck
he stretched out supine, but he couldn’t check
the urge to sleep, despite his hunger and thirst.
He dreamed about an exile, who was cursed
to sail to Crete and engineer arcades
that won him architectural accolades
but couldn’t quell his master’s cuckoldry.
Daedalus had tweaked topology
to neutralize default topography
with walls capricious as Maeander’s banks
when, after gushing toward the sea, he yanks
his course northeast as though Celaenae called
him back to the spring, near which the satyr, bald
to the bone, howled at his tormentor, Why
rip me from myself? This is too high
a price to drub your lyre with my pipes!
before he decked a cave with gory stripes
that drained from every passing faun and nymph,
satyr and shepherd, all the sweet, sad lymph
their eyes could issue, puddling the base
of the green hill Celaenians would deface
with their acropolis and forfeiting
its salt in the Maeander’s wandering—
so capricious, even the architect
required luck and all his intellect
to enter the labyrinth and find a route
from its wavering axis to the lone way out.
This was where they trapped the “Minotaur,”
unseen by all his kin, except the sun,
which wasn’t easy for Asterion
to understand: he walked through Knossos freely
and even witnessed Minos hoist his mealy
ass on the queen, whose linen nine months later
welcomed a shrill and bloody decorator,
Glaukos, who crowned upon its twisting rucks:
many will suffer when one fat king fucks.
In Knossos every pillar, brick, and plinth
began to imitate the labyrinth.
The palace, once an undivided hall,
became a complex in whose muralled sprawl
a boy could lose himself. Pasiphaë
let Glaukos wander while she faced the sea
and wept the orange out of aching eyes
and tried to recoup the seminal surprise
of the white bull opening the wizened blue.
Her unremunerated retinue
one day lost track of Glaukos while he rolled
a ball named Sminth. Though someone should have told
the boy that ball was not a real mouse,
if he was like his father, then to douse
the boy’s delusion would be suicide:
no Cretan tethered honesty to pride.
At noon King Minos came to chew a gray
discus of beef upon a gilded tray
as was his habit, but he startled all
the waiting slaves by asking them to call
Glaukos to the table. No one knew
where he had gone, a fault the hitherto
indifferent father rushed to castigate:
when all else failed, he knew that he was great
again the moment he unclenched his fist
and saw the queen’s slaves lift their chins and twist
between red pillars, while the guards who’d kicked
the footstools bearing up the women flicked
spit from their eyes and almost made the king
laugh with their mimicry of wriggling,
then joined the soldiers rummaging the palace
to find the son and skirt the father’s malice.
Their rummaging turned up no hideaway,
and Minos had to send Hupakoë
to Delphi, where an oracle would bore
holes in the ignorance he failed to ignore.
Now harvest crammed the Cretan granaries,
and in a month or two the bays would freeze,
and they’d be stuck in Phocis till nearly spring
with nothing but the Pythia’s babbling
and chilblained shepherd boys to pass the time.
But saying No to Minos was a crime.
Crossing the stormy Archipelago
proved easier than courting the undertow
of royal paranoia. Minos guessed
the queen regarded one less orange crest
streaking her sight no reason for real grief.
Her mourning magnified his disbelief
as Minos waited for Hupakoë
to tell him where the prince’s body lay.
Did she already know? Was that a smirk
wrinkling her black veil’s openwork?
Minos decided that he ought to die, / Minos decided that the queen must die,
but wondering how best to satisfy
this obligation stayed his stubby hand
until Hupakoë toed Cretan sand
and told them what the Pythia declared:
when light and darkness equitably shared
the hours from one sunrise to the next,
yokels would fear their cattle might be hexed
and bear an even odder herbivore.
And whoever came up with the metaphor
that best described the monster was the one
who’d find the body of the king’s lost son.
After the equinox, a cowherd came
to Knossos with the calf that won him fame
although this poem will not preserve his name:
at dawn the calf was white, by noon maroon,
and by dusk darker than the sweetest prune.
Summoned by Minos, the Athenian engineer
didn’t predict the crux of his career
awaited him at court. Although he viewed
the calf exhaustively, no wit ensued.
After a day of watching Daedalus
watch the calf and take superfluous
measurements, Minos told him, That’s enough!
If you’re so smart, you shouldn’t find this tough.
Why can’t you come up with one metaphor?
But dazzled by the morphing calf, the more
he stared the more he stuttered, and the king
did not restrain himself from mimicking
the exile from the home of oratory.
It was an Argive who would win the glory
the Athenian took for granted: Polyeidos,
the bard who gave the queen her day-to-day dose
of sad songs, asked permission to propose
a metaphor. Speak up, if not, who knows
how long we’ll have to wait for D-d-d-
d-daedalus to show Calliope
hasn’t entirely deserted him.
A metaphor is not a synonym—
something this reject cannot comprehend.
Argive, proceed. I hope you don’t pretend
to know more than you can deliver us;
you’ll get worse treatment than old Daedalus.
The bard spoke: Lord, this multicolored calf
is a mulberry. The king’s garotted laugh,
which no one standing there had heard before,
confirmed the bard had found the metaphor.
Pasiphaë concealed a smile beneath
her left hand, while the Athenian ground his teeth—
a failed attempt to clot his runny eyes.
Excellent, Argive! You deserve a prize—
but not before you find where Glaukos is.
The harper’s hands, adorned with calluses,
received three objects from the plush-palmed king:
a sword, an unplumed helmet, and a ring
of keys. He’s probably nearby, so you
should track down places that my retinue
have overlooked in their moronic haste.
If nothing turns up, Glaukos must have chased
Sminth in the labyrinth. You could get gored —
the reason for the helmet and the sword.
Because of dopey Daedalus, you must wait
to start the search. I hope dawn leads you straight
to my poor Glaukos. Don’t forget: you’ve raised
my hopes. It’s too late now to fail unfazed.
The palace occupied its western edge
with a garden, in which the unmown sedge
cuffed fishponds whose carp rarely came to grief
since Minos made it wrong to not eat beef.
The bard’s heels burst every algae rind in vain:
no lost prince rotted on the graveled tain.
The bard crawled under every bush for naught:
thorned shade denied the hiding place he sought.
The bard then checked the vine-choked sheds where hoes,
rakes, pails, and lichened shovels lent repose
to spiders linking them with lasting threads.
He liked the place: the polymorphous dreads
stirring up every hour at court harassed
the bard no longer there; the squawking blast
of royal irritations quit his ears,
replaced by breezes, birdsong, and the tears
dripped by the “Minotaur.” The bard came close
to pastoral, forgetting his morose
mission to find the king’s presumed-dead son.
He walked along a wall where moss had spun
a mural that abstained from imitation.
Buzzing broke through his idle exploration:
a swooping owl scattered bees and sipped
leftover rain from the threshold of a crypt
that bore no letters in its verdigris
to sieve its tenant out of sheer decease.
The owl showed the bard her weary face,
then screeched, and launched a solitary race
toward the sky in which it disappeared.
Returning bees amassed a second beard
on Polyeidos, who recalled the ring
that dangled bits and bows, but opening
the cellar door transformed his angled knees
into sore sundials as he plied the keys,
and none of them would fit inside the wards
(tempting the bard to break them with the sword’s
tip, though the king might call it vandalism)
except the last he tried. For want of chrism
the cellar door screeched louder than the owl
as Polyeidos lifted it. The foul
air, which set him retching, traded one
dark hollow for another, while the sun
limned an occlusion of posterity:
hanging headlong in honey, the absentee
showed Polyeidos nothing but his feet,
which had rotted so the mouth could steal a treat.
They broke off when the bard pulled Glaukos out:
the viscid orange hair would bar all doubt.
The vat preserved the boy as though he’d drowned
moments, not months, before. The gnawing sound
of bees took on a different timbre: flies
assembled in the crypt to burglarize
the stolen honey, and while most preferred
the open vat, its recent inmate lured
a multitude. The bard bore Glaukos home
adorned with flies and chips of honeycomb.
While Minos wept, Pasiphaë directed
slaves to clean the body and detected
many small wounds in which she rubbed her balm.
Daedalus had regained his old aplomb
and started to design the prince’s tomb,
but Minos knew that hubris leads to doom
only because most men give up too soon:
You will not bury him. He’s as immune
to death as I am, or I’ll make him so.
The gods delighted in my overthrow
of city after city when I beat
all Greece into submission. Death won’t cheat
me now – the gods will always side with Crete!