my claim to bravery: I’ll climb ashore,
and face my father though he call me “whore,”
a tender prelude to rough punishments.
Megarans, rifling the Cretan tents,
didn’t see her turn, but Nisos, high
above, defaced with feathers, keen to try
his talons on her eyes, declined his tail,
and sent his daughter swimming toward a sail
nibbled by the horizon. Scylla shrank
and flattened, and the hair the sun loved sank
to tangle algae. Scales caged Scylla’s bald
still virgin flesh, and in the sea she’s called
Kiris, a name that stuck because she sliced
her father’s lock off. Crete’s king sacrificed
a hundred bulls when his fleet brought him home;
the bloody brackets pinked the briny foam
just to fulfill a vow he’d made to Zeus.
Megaran trophies tried to reproduce
in every room if not on every wall
his northern glories, but a fitful bawl
from one room in the palace neutralized
the victories his absence compromised.
Pasiphaë’s inhuman fornication
had cornified a growing bifurcation.