PASIPHAE: and the Birth of the Minotaur

O PASIPHAE A Queenly Interlude

o unhappy maid, what madness seized your captured heart and pounded your yearning womb to such unnatural lusts! Fortunate she indeed if there had never been flocks—Pasiphae love-slave to the wild white bull stud

Heureuse si jamais, dans ses riches travaux,

Cérès n’eût pour le joug élevé des troupeaux !

where o soul do you tend ? why in fury do you love forests? I confess the fatal misery of mother’s malady ‘cause our love and our race knows very well how to sin in the woodlands (I say sons of suns a Minotaur Messiah). Oh happy she, happy happy she, if never herds had been! By tilting titillation bent in infamy you dared to love the duke of the herd of savage bulls! That One of shining snow white wild impatient of yoke adulterous driver of indomitable flocks: and yet he loved something! he rode my mechanical bull!

—Happy oh so happy Me, if never Herds had been—

[but big oh so big]

Pasiphae the Queen of Crete

assaulted by fiery furtive fury,

Bride of Minos rich in lineage of children

[in her matrix of begetting]

Matrilineal

following the apex of Taurus across the sky

to whichever river where he cooled his thirst

through whatever wides of plain he pastured in

laying his noble flanks on the warm grasses

his fleece was white as snow as glorious as the

milky-way mantle

so that everyplace where Toro went

the Queenly slut was sure to go,

[once you’ve had it that big you never go back] cuz

There-to she coude skippe and make game,

As any kide or calf folwinge his dame...

[replace the craving]

for full filling in the center

she had ever-inventive Daedalus

build her a Heifer’s hull expressly for that purpose

of insistent fertilization by her groping

root-system of royal uterus thirsty for

a constellation’s seed—it was

A heifer’s hull with a hole in just the right spot

for that insistent insemination

of a mini Taurus monster:

proud son

worthy

of her freakish appetites...

My Bucolica is a modern reboot of the "eclogue" form originating in Classical Greece and Rome and much rehashed throughout all European literature. It usually comes in the form of a collection of shepherd's songs, dialogues, and stories featuring themes of love/desire, nature/the seasons, death/mortality, and the passing of time. It is often a playground to poeticize the animal world and humankind's relation to it, as well as particulars of the seemingly idyllic life led by simple shepherds and farmers in Arcadia. It is also referred to as bucolic literature. I wrote my Bucolica 2017-2018 in a mix of poetry and prose.