If you would be Helen,
I would be king,
I would be Paris,
I’d be any given spartan out of a thousand ships’ worth.  

You don’t see me,
but my sun and moon are grade-A dark amber, sticky-sweet and clear as the water if you shine a light on them-
will you wring the brine from my lungs one more time?  

You don’t see me,
but your breath is hot at my back.  

Two thousand years ago,
if I found you,
at Attica, or Rhodes, or any dot in the Aegean,
would you be torchlit marble, pure and cold as the driven snow? No.
You are the vines on the wall,
you are the knock at my door,
you are grapes like ashes, daisies in the hair of a sleeping child-
You don’t see me,  

but I am the tangent and you are the curve and if you will only let me,
I will glance across your bow at only a single point in space, for only a moment, so impossibly brief-
that neither of us will even have to know if it happened or not.