me some advantage. Slut, if you must live—
and I won’t kill a king’s defenseless daughter,
although she’s guilty of her people’s slaughter—
I pray the gods deny you any rest
on land or sea. Explore the frigid west—
farther from Crete the better! I detest
you, Scylla, and the crime you’ve here confessed.
After the righteous conqueror rebuilt
Megara (making good the blood he spilt,
with Cretan plumbing and enlightened laws),
he did not stay to savor their applause,
but told his men to load the Cretan fleet
and speed him back to Knossos. Scylla’s feet
would never tread his decks although he owed
his victory to her. She sang an ode
that praised him as the greatest son of Zeus,
but desperate flattery would not seduce
the man she loved, who didn’t hear her voice’s
attempt to catalogue the prudent choices
that only Minos, king of Crete, could make.
He left her in the fleet’s brack wake.
The oarsmen wouldn’t hoist the fool on deck.
She kept on wading, water to her neck,
because she saw her people on the beach
and she could never allay their hate with speech.
Scylla said all her prayers; the Cretan sails
kept nudging the horizon. Scylla’s wails,
gleaning no mercy, glided into sobs.
Her fingers folded into knuckled knobs
with which she beat her head to punctuate
a doomed apostrophe: You liberate
yourself, my king, so easily from me—
from me, who handed you the victory
that brings you home alight with fame and spoils—
from me, that idiot whose heart still boils
beneath these cool waves. What a priceless gift
I gave, yet you won’t even stop to lift
me on your decks? I would have much preferred
death at your hands. You left my ode unheard.
Where can I go? Not that you care. The beach
arrays the vengeful men who soon must reach
my standing refuge, and they’ll want to kill
me—rightly so. I’m sure they’ll take their fill
of the joys that chaperone a virgin’s death.
They’ll track me here, as close to you as breath
permits, and nothing but my father’s word
can stop them. But my treason has inured
old Nisos to compassion—rightly so.
Unmolested by the undertow,
I might wade left and reach Eleusis or
right and reach Corinth. But they’ll both abhor
me once the two-faced tale of father’s hair
repeats itself to them. So anywhere
I go, my exile will bring on fresh exile
or stale death. Where your colossus spreads its legs, I’ll
burnish the brazen toes and sweep the dust
and live off errant peels and castoff crust,
for only Crete lies open to me now!
Oh Minos, if you won’t turn back that prow
and lift me out of this, I must conclude—
ungrateful coward!—that your father wooed
a tigress or a Libyan shoal or sore
Charybdis—not the child of Agenor,
gentle Europa. No, I won’t believe,
favored by Zeus, that princess could conceive
a brute like you! It must have been a real
bull, who prowling with a pervert’s zeal,
scorned lowing heifers and pursued exotic
flesh. May Megara’s walls turn my aquatic
death into song, and may poor father laugh
to see the windrows daub my epitaph.
I want to die, and that’s what I deserve.
But killing me’s a privilege I reserve
for my Megarans, the dear ones I betrayed—
not to the ungrateful coward who just made
a fortune out of their humiliation.
Back home you’ll gather more than acclamation:
Pasiphaë, ensconced in wood, seduced
a bull and nine months afterward produced
a child to end all children—right reward!
I doubt the wind will take these words aboard
the ship it speeds to Knossos. If it did,
you’d ignore them. That’s why your wife hid
in a false cow: the bull’s brutality
proved less painful than her absentee
husband’s disdain. Your numbness is my pain,
what my self-pity preened itself to feign,
the pain I only knew from songs before.
The ships recede—no, I recede, no more
the tower’s cynosure, but just a dab
of meat along a dimming coast. The crab
that sidles by my feet will never grace
your memory, and neither should my face. . . .