Scylla’s creation. But it cried, More gore!
Vines popped through grout and formed an unhinged door
impeding rescue while the princess gashed
a geyser in her face. The monster’s splashed
beards tickled up Athea’s neck until
his pivoting mouths competed to suck their fill
of her old blood. The king came back and bid
his men to chop away the ivy grid
behind which who knew what was happening.
But by the time they made an opening
Athea filmed the floor, and Scylla’s thing
stood taller than the stupefied stooped king.
A femur, goat or human, almost drained
of marrow, crammed each mouth. No one’d explained
that gods loath blood and only drink clear nectar.
Scylla forgot to give the god a vector
of prayer, a proper name, in all that violence.
Father and child convened awed silence
before the god spit out the bones and spoke:
Idiot mortals, why did you revoke
my priceless nonexistence? Scylla kneeled
amid Athea’s drippings and revealed
her second-dearest desire: I need a god
to teach the gateway how to sprawl like sod.
Grapevines erupted from the roof beams, scurried
down to the brackets and the hinges, worried
the deep nails out, released the bar, and tore
apart, entangled in the falling door,
which made the loudest thud that Nisos ever
heard. Who, he asked himself, had dared to sever
his purple lock? No one, his hand reported.
The birthday of his daughter’s god aborted
the prophecy he lived by, but he still
thought it protected him. Despite the shrill
laments with which Megara’s workers hailed
their doomed king, Nisos lurched outside and flailed
his lock as proof of his impunity.
Torchlight allowed the grinning king to see
the fallen door with his own eyes and peep
at the enemy camp, alight with broken sleep.
He should have looked behind: the new god wielded
the knife still dripping mixed blood. Nisos yielded
his purple lock on time, for Minos crossed
the gateway’s threshold just as Nisos lost
the last snip of his scalp’s circumference.
Cretan aggression shifted to self-defense:
a two-faced god above a dying king
stretched out before a princess suffering,
her gaze declared, from something riskier
than imminent bereavement—the quadrature
absorbing Minos called for a quick decision.