allowed Sophia to direct each stage
of the obsequies: the bath, the prothesis,
the ekphora, the loath libation’s hiss,
the flames’ translation, and the delivery
of ash to urn. Nisos, though not pleased to see
such honors given Minos, couldn’t stop
himself from watching from the unshaded top
of Apollo’s tower, whose humming quelled
the rote dirges. Gulls and oar-strokes knelled
one ship beyond the tower’s prospect. The urn,
swaddled in purple, rested in the stern
beside Sophia all the way to Crete.
The sailors thought their enemies would treat
them cruelly when their voyage was done. The queen,
however, knew such vengeance would demean
her more than it would demonstrate that she
had loved her husband, and the courtesy
Nisos had shown his conqueror demanded
reciprocation. So the queen commanded
her slaves to feast them. Beef and honeycomb
glutted the crew, who sailed unpoisoned home.
How miserable she would’ve been if oxen
had never nibbled Ida’s grass! The toxin
that punished Minos expiated her.
A marble tomb was ready to immure
the king’s remains, but ash was all Megara
sent, and ash can’t see the jeweled tiara
atop the king’s bronze effigy, and ash
can’t play with sawdust dogs or eat the stash
of encrypted meats. Pasiphaë bewailed
her lord and husband’s early death and railed
against the Fates, whom insults do not irk,
and let her sun-licked nipples perk
the way to the tomb and gashed her chest
with blackened fingernails. So long oppressed,
the slaves and workers who were witnessing
his second funeral despised their king.
The priests deposited an urn inside
the scarlet larnax. No one there decried
this violation of the liturgy,
which would’ve brought Crete long-term misery
had it occurred in a less unhappy time.
Asterion beheld this pantomime
from his mother’s tower. Meanwhile, weeping rage
that only two more funerals could assuage,
his eldest sister looked up at the sill
on which the horns weaned. Eager to distill
Ariadne’s animus, but not
to implement an embryonic plot,
Daedalus took comfort from her grief.
Like a red bough dripping leaf after leaf,
Crete’s fleet fluttered home. Pasiphaë
forgave the sobbing losers’ treachery
and sent them to their wives, and nobody
protested but her daughter: The amnesty
these regicides deserve is a common grave!
Are you a queen or a just a dolled up slave
drunk on your first taste of groveling?
But after decades curdled by a king
who thought vindictiveness was rectitude,
Cretans allowed their memory of her lewd
adventures to recede. Their wariness
morphed into love. They had to reassess
even Asterion, whom some called cute.
Whether Hupakoë was still en route
to Crete no longer hinged their fantasies.
Their dead king’s war was an ash breeze,
but once the armada scattered, trade resumed
its pillaging, and Cretan rigging loomed
in every harbor from Herakleion
to Troy. A year completed its dodecagon
before Pasiphaë announced the first
reform: her husband’s name, so often cursed,
though silently, by workers trudging back
to clammy hovels, need not grace a plaque
on every Cretan lintel anymore.
The proclamation hatched a happy chore:
Whoever grates the gilding keeps the gold!
Few Cretans could believe what they were told
when they first heard of the new queen’s next reform.
Her quiet words achieved what the worst storm
encouraged by a suffering people’s prayers
had failed to do: the lure of surly stares,
the king’s colossus, opened its empty feet
and smashed apart where it fell in the street
and felt once more the flame that fused its tin
and copper. Minos left the furnace thin,
his concave girth supplying candlesticks,
railings, and tripods, while masons grouted bricks
for the new temple where Pasiphaë
would celebrate her father’s liturgy.
The first attempts to reify his glory
had annoyed Minos. Bronze proved derogatory:
Cretan mechanics couldn’t cast colossi
that wouldn’t warp once breezes cooled the drossy
alloys they brewed. But Daedalus had absconded
from Athenian justice and responded
to Crete’s king’s call for someone who could cast
bronze into monuments whose lines would last.
In one month, Daedalus achieved what no
Cretan had done in years, but the afterglow
of pride in his technique did not impede
his admiration for the myrmic speed
with which the people unmade what he’d made.
Ariadne hung a veil blockade
to keep her mother’s mother’s rapist out
of her rooms, but when the sun’s diurnal route
approached its yearly apogee, the veils
couldn’t preserve her sleep: lycoperdales
of rude awakening sprouted in her dreams.
Then Ariadne labored at black seams
and wore the night the planet’s tilting axis
denied her grief. A vapid parataxis
alternated wasted days at court.
At last her mother criticized her swart
attire: Ariadne, lengthened mourning
frays logic and decorum—in fact, by scorning
life you suggest its loss is meaningless.
Poor Minos cannot see your dismal dress.
Now let’s imagine fathers never died:
then fathering could not be justified,
and daughters would become the lifelong slaves
of toothless tyrants never finding graves.
Such talk intensified her daughter’s rage.
I understand your husband’s death’s a page
easy for you to turn. What’s a box of dust
compared to Helios, whose daily lust
for burning never fails? Pasiphaë
spotted a single hair that fluttered free
from the braid helix Ariadne coiled
around her head. Disgusted with her spoiled
daughter’s stench, she plucked the stray red hair:
It’s time you started acting like my heir!
These rags are hoarding up your rancid sweat.
No prince would even touch you on a bet.
Go take a bath, and give up this pathetic
attempt to gull the people with ascetic
antics until they think you loved your father
more than I did. Fool, you shouldn’t bother:
it wouldn’t make them love you more than me.
Daedalus was not displeased to see
Ariadne trudging back to her rooms,
and he recalled that when one’s best chance looms
it can’t, by definition, loom again.
There’d be no better time to julienne
this royal family ripe for usurpation.
The evening cool would kindle his inspiration.
At dusk few people ventured to the west
edge of the royal palace, whose recessed
garden was a long way from the court.
Usually, there wasn’t much to thwart
the thoughts that graced his after-dinner walk,
so the unmistakable lilt of lovers’ talk
surprised the Athenian: between two red
cypress posts, a beauty hung her head
over a parapet to meet the gaze
of a man below, who sang a song in praise
of Phaedra’s eyes, of Phaedra’s hair, her lips,
the breasts which tantalized him and the hips
distance denied his fingers. Daedalus
witnessed, unwitnessed, the same dichotomous
rehearsal of desire the following dusk.
Desire was an ear they couldn’t husk:
the unseen sailor’s warbling scaled the wall
on a lyre’s strings, but music couldn’t haul
his body high enough to hold her hand.
The voyeur felt a stratagem expand
like plague’s dry leaves in youthful folly’s cup.
Drawings and prototypes were cluttering up
his little house long after he’d completed
the bronze colossus, whose contours he repeated
now on a scale that matched the real king.
The boneless Minos was a flabby thing
that made its wearer feel like its precursor;
its sneered lips excreted discourse terser
than the logorrhea of the original,
but the clammy fabric draped the cardboard skull
to consummate an almost perfect likeness:
only a quibbler would fault the whiteness
around the sockets for providing too
gentle a contrast with the ochre hue
smearing the remainder of the mask.
Daedalus could not complete this task
alone: he taught his only son the way
to stitch him in, so treason mimicked play.
Daedalus hid among rakes, pails, and shears
between which cobwebs ran their narrow biers
in a shed concealed behind a vine-snared tree.
Icarus wrapped the plush hyperbole
around his father, huddling in his sweat
until they heard the unharmonized duet
sung by the sailor and a drowsy dove
leaving the day his last appeal for love.
Then Daedalus left his hideout for a paler
darkness, and Phaedra, gazing at the sailor,
heard slovenly footfalls, turned, and saw her dead
father approaching. Phaedra would’ve fled,
but Minos was too wide. She screamed. Her lover
stopped his song and saw a new head hover
between the posts. His brother stilled his lyre,
and from his back Halieus clambered higher