when nobody would be awake to see
the birthday gag that wrung his nephew’s Wee.
With Talos on the fake cow’s back, they passed
beneath the effigy that would outlast
its archetype but not the floor it shaded:
slaves climbed their owner’s image and abraded
its surface daily, lest it grow a green
skin like inferior statues; the orange sheen
must always greet the visitor’s dulled eyes
(to eulogize is not to oxidize).
One of the royal maids helped Talos down
from the wheeled cow, tightened the gag’s frown,
and bore him to Deucalion’s distant bed.
Collapsing with a dull thud on each tread,
the cow, pushed and pulled by maids, ascended
spiraling marble steps, in whom its splendid
whiteness aroused no solidarity:
they missed their sunless home in Italy,
before the mattocks brought the wind and rain
and their yanking down the Apennine moraine
to the Archipelago and blinding Crete.
The king’s wife leaned out from her window seat
and watched her maids convey the cow around
the tower to her rooms. Eager to expound
how his contraption worked, the engineer
pulled back the withers of the bovine bier.
Marveling at his craftsmanship, the queen
believed that she must enter his machine
at once to see how well it fit her. Shut
your eyes, Athenian, or turn and glut
them on the night’s black pastures: I must feel
your creature from the inside. Each hand’s heel
tread softly on an eye as the engineer
gave her his back: she would not see him leer.
The queen’s robe rustled off. Her bangles knelled
one another as her nipples swelled.
Her maids assisted her inside the furred
hollow and shut the lid. The wood snout slurred
the queen’s words, but she had no trouble breathing.
Daedalus desired nothing more than sheathing
a blade through the fake cow and the false wife,
but since he didn’t bring a sword or knife,
he persevered with his initial plan.
Your Highness thinks I’m just a handyman
who you can blackmail with impunity.
Now ask your hot sire to set you free.
He tapped a button in the cow’s pine chine:
a bronze spike shot a perpendicular line
from the short plate to the short loin.
This was as far as her wish to conjoin
with cattle would proceed. Her blood and cut
ichor drenched the death-trap’s wooden gut
and dribbled out its muzzle. Muffled moos
taught the maids the real dupe of the ruse.
Some struggled to free their mistress from the gin,
but the spike that killed her also locked her in.
Some pushed the traitor to the window seat
from which he fell. Athena made him beat
the night air with new wings. His legs contracted
into a tail before his clogs impacted
the stones below. His gray hair disappeared
beneath white feathers, but his flat eyes peered
out of black streaks. He didn’t recollect
that an orange king unworthy of respect
had welcomed him to Crete or that a queen
offended him or even how to call
his nephew—or his son—to avenge the fall
that turned, as his brain dwindled, into flight.
He didn’t think to fly home. Ida’s white
ridges attracted him: her gorges saved
the bones his reconfigured stomach craved.