they spice their pleasures with the threat of goring?
Perhaps a god had cursed her. Pitying
the pervert queen, the white bull tried to wring
some lust from memory: the beauty chained
to the Nemean olive tree. Her captor feigned
sleep, but his eyes were not unanimous
in closure, and the cow was clamorous,
thrashing the trunk and thumping her lover’s chine
with hard olives. His human concubine
now hailed his cautious entry with coital sap
and sounds that purged reluctance from her lap,
sounds that grew louder as the splinters broke
her true skin and her lover followed stroke
with stroke, as though unwilling to revoke
that steady motion—let her sire unyoke
his horses and the pine hide start to smoke!—
until, at last, she feels his pleasure soak
the farthest niches of her coffined womb. . . .
That wasn’t why he charged across the spume
instead of drowning: Minos might repent
his botched vow to Poseidon and present
the white bull as a proper sacrifice:
against that day, the whitecaps mimicked ice
wherever his hooves trod. The bull conveyed
Asterion across blue hills that swayed
with hissing inconsistency. The wind
lapsed into breezes as a river thinned
Poseidon’s waves with freshness and compelled
the bull to swim ashore. Asterion smelled
the fish gasping on the docks, where nets
were spread to dry by fishers making bets
on who the strange arrivants were and why
they came. Some people rushed to deify
the boy with one hoofed hand and one hoofed foot.
They bruised their brown brows on the docks and put
less credulous hypotheses to rest:
the fishers prayed, a live myth coalesced,
and a hawk was wheeling slowly overhead.
She sped south to the queen and said
a new god was in Egypt. Canvas spread
across a royal mast. The Nile refused
to sink the barge whose porphyry hull abused
water’s benevolence. The queen cruised down
until she reached the little fishing town
and bid Asterion and his mount aboard.
Jostled by sweating dancers, free men oared
the barge upstream, and court musicians hailed
the new god with Egyptian horns that scaled
possibilities of sound that ears
inured to lyres and Athenian gears
never imagined. Though the queen intended
to treat the new god like a god, her splendid
artifice didn’t countermand the wind,
which rose to drown out oboes and chagrined
the sail by swelling it and scattering
its perfume. But the boy ignored the bling,
entranced by the queen’s queerness. Devoid of hair,
she found more novel ways make him stare:
green stalks radiated from her black
scalp to form an umbel, while a rack
of white antlers proclaimed her head of state—
what metal crowns can barely imitate.
So Berenib conveyed Asterion south
to The While Walls beyond the Nile’s mouth.
Its murals everywhere proclaimed what Knossos,
preoccupied with one man’s bronze colossus,
forgot: that human shoulders could project
inhuman heads. Asterion’s tears flecked
the sand around a four-part mural showing
cow-headed Hathor’s mercy. Merely lowing
wouldn’t console the boy, whose father’s tongue
never pronounced the loving words that hung
themselves in muteness. But the scribes made fate
in Egypt, not the painters: to abdicate
or marry was the only choice they gave
Queen Berenib, who used her youth to stave
off her decision nine years, time she spent
thinking about Asterion, who went
all over Egypt with the bull to learn
the way her people lived. At their return
to The White Walls, they studied glyphs, which seemed
no more than little paintings, but which teemed
with lies and truths one can’t grasp at a glance.
With only hooves, it’s difficult to advance
in writing. But a derelict dance floor
suited the white bull’s purposes. He wore
one of his forehooves down until it served
as a round stylus. Covered with sand and curved
at the top and bottom, the dance floor became
a writing pad, which didn’t show the same
text forever: when the white bull finished
practicing, or empty space diminished
and he could write no farther, short-toothed rakes
plied by the scribes’ boys, smoothed out his mistakes
and feats until the sand was blank again.
After a year, the white bull proved that men
and women aren’t the only animals
who write. The scribes asked questions, and the bull’s
answers outdid them all in eloquence.
He wrote about the north, where reticence
and truth are rare. King Minos illustrated
his dimmest views. But that the white bull mated
with his cursed queen and sired the mutant youth
now worshipped by the Egyptians was a truth
he was too modest or to wise to write.