The Minotaur’s a filthy old man
locked in a cage in an attic.
En route to the brick mill town

 
where he’s kept, a fresh road cut
glistens with rose quartz crystals,
some as thick as my forearm.
 

I stop to gather specimens
and meet a father and son with sack
and geologist’s hammer, the child


twitchy with scientific zeal.
I realize this is my father
and the child is the child I was,

 
athletic, geeky, too eager
and charmless to conquer the world.
I find an especially vivid


cluster of smooth and perfect crystals
and present it to the child. He grins
like a furnace and hustles it


safely to the back seat of their car.
The father, my father, looks me
in the eye, then turns away


to conceal the unquenchable sneer.
Driving on toward the Minotaur,
I regret having met so awkward


a version of myself, regret
wasting all those Sundays prowling
to documented mineral sites 


in the Berkshires, the hill towns crisp
with old money, the landowners glad
to oblige the eccentrics scraping


the earth and sifting mine debris.
Now I have to face the Minotaur
and use a lifetime of learning                       


to determine if he really is
the Minotaur. Yet I’m clouded
by this childhood persona, brisk

 
with purpose, literal, obsessed
with science. Greek myths belong
in Greece, he insists. The Minotaur

 
was just an outsized ugly bull
that died three thousand years ago.
I arrive at the Minotaur house,

 
a windowless ruin. Beer cans
and condoms litter the ghostly rooms.
I rush up the stairs to the attic.
 

A roar of threat, hunger, or pain.
Sure enough, a filthy old man
in a cage. I recognize him


already. Not the Minotaur,
a bull dead for three thousand years,
but Theseus, doomed to replicate


the rage of the creature he killed
to fulfill a foolish legend.
The expression he directs at me

 
glitters like the rose quartz I offered
that crazy doomed child; and the raw
intelligence of this hero,


starved for centuries, rebukes me
not for coming to visit him
but for neglecting to bring a sword.