No Helen

You’ll never understand Sappho, 
because you don’t read Ancient Greek 
or the hidden pages of history 
where we scrawled our passion,
with sequestered longing, desperate and dear, 
like a message in a bottle, left to the sea,
to the shape of our shapeless love.

You'lll never understand how reading Sappho
is like finding myself, in a boat, in a body, 
how the map of love finally has texture. 
I know you don’t want to read another love poem 
to a faceless woman, but I have not yet found her face, 
but she is no Helen. She has no men 
on which to triangulate desire.