Minos decided to construct a maze
to shield the monster from the people’s gaze.
Minos employed the world’s best engineer
to make his wife’s horned bastard disappear
deep in a copious network of corridors
whose bending walls would start to look like floors
to anyone who wandered there for long:
even the bricks would wander, like a song
without refrain or like the Phrygian river
who frustrates boatmen seeking to deliver
punctual freight: Maeander flows for fun,
backward and forward; his currents rarely run
from source to sea directly but loop back
doodling many a marshy cul de sac—
Daedalus made the maze so difficult
that it was necessary to consult
his blueprints for the engineer to find
his way out of the prison he designed,
in which the Minotaur patrolled the mortar
joints for the culms he craved, and where the slaughter
of seven youths twice ended nine-year fasts
from flesh. But when black-rigged Athenian masts
reached Crete the third time, Theseus led
the heptad offering, which did not shed
any of its own blood. The prince was no
better than those who’d braved the winding woe
within the winding woe: the Minotaur’s
entrails. But the Athenian carnivores
procured a mercy that they hadn’t earned.
The Minotaur, an upright grazer, spurned
their meat. He smiled and told the unhoofed stranger:
My bastard father stuck us in this manger.
He starved me till the hunger made me kill
and eat your uncles raw. But now my will
masters hunger, though there’s nothing green
left in the labyrinth. I won’t demean
myself by killing hornless men to fuel
the king’s revenge machine. I’m not his tool.
Cut my head off—that’s the quickest way.
Scouring bricks and flagstones every day
for grass, I learned that these four-sided things,
diagonally divided, spread two wings
whose three sides always follow one strict law.
Your exiled craftsman with his awl and saw
only works by instinct. What I know
is not a knack. The death I’ll undergo
when I stop talking cannot separate
this law from me, though I may immigrate
to a body even more misfortunate:
the mind remembers what the horns forget.
His belly couldn’t chymify the sword
the prince inserted, but the victim gored
none of the Athenians. He charged in pain,
reddening bricks—and men he could’ve slain.
If treachery was easy, getting out