To initialr: Thank you.
Epeius built his cousin, 20 feet tall,
sides plank’d with pine,
and they, Odysseus and his brother,
Ajax and others, hid in the hollow,
but why did Troy accept such a gift?
There is some talk that
it might never have been a trick,
it might have been some
horse-headed battering ram
that evolved into legend,
but I still pity poor Laocoon,
strangled with his two sons,
by Poseidon for crying out:
“Equo ne credite, Teucri
Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos
et dona ferentes.”
This cousin, not built
with Minerva’s blessing,
decorates the outside of an
Asian clothing store,
but it begs to break,
wanting to gnash a bit
and scrape primitive virtues
into the painted asphalt.
If he could breathe,
I bet he would huff,
expelling wet gusts through
furiously trembling nostrils.
He is bent to butt, to ram,
if he had rolled up in front
of the walls of Troy
no doubt it would have arrested
Deiphobus and Helen
on their investigation of it.
(Poor Deiphobus too, brother
to a heady, stupid fellow
who seduced and then died,
and then fleeting, death-worn husband.)
Maybe this cousin would have
saved, would have surfaced enough
doubt that even Poseidon’s
strangling and Cassandra’s poor madness
would have deterred the Trojans
from bringing murderers
into the womb of their town,
but history cannot be re-written,
destiny hath already compell'd.
This horse, this mythless cousin,
Tyre Equine, ready to destroy
another Troy with no need
for forty, adrenaline-laden
soldiers in its bowels. It could
and would break, it wouldn’t
have waited for cowardly
nightfall, it would have butted
down the walls itself and the Greeks
would have had to pick the hairs
of Helen’s magnificent head
out of his teeth the next day.