Minotaur

^{after Carl Phillips}

The best part,
how we make to
part the beast
from its self. 

Take the bull  
(whose head it’s got. 
Now, conjure you—
the offal, bovine throat,
a veiny tract meant
for an alfalfa pasture,
clover, sundry grasses
soon to cud; or 

a garden got at: trampled 
angel’s breath, marigold, 
            daisy, rose, chomped down,
            also, though, grown, only,
            it seems, to prune to mean 
            a human being 
what humans are—

and there: a tendril 
coils from your skull,
then petals split 
the temple, come 
to bloom. See, how 
now the bull face, 
stricken, blinks), 
finding a way, 
reeling, through new 
bewildering appetites.

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“I have long admired the sinuousness of Carl Phillips’s sentences and have an affinity for his engagement with the literature and mythology of Greece’s antiquity. When I was six, the labyrinth-dwelling Minotaur was one of the first unique monsters I could name, so he’s haunted my mind for a while now. Once, I thought I would write a series of poems using mythical animals as anchors. Though I sort of abandoned that idea, ‘Minotaur’ is my favorite of them. It allows me to wrestle with the idea of figurative language, a poetic tool about which I have some ambivalence.”
—Douglas Kearney