Not much is known/ about our namesake scholars speculate she was not/beautiful but painters thought/ she should have been rendered lovely then/ on canvas vases urns how her lyre gave us lyric how her lyrics hewed/honorifics Tenth Muse/Lady Homer parents’ names uncertain/ lovers’ names uncertain/ period of exile uncertain once I thought a lesbian as mythic/ as a mermaid// who after all had ever seen one/ hybrid & glistening/ perched on a sea rock// who had ever seen one/ unobscured/ in a history book that’s right Jane Addams/ they obscured you often she holds a plectrum/ in her hand/ ready to pluck perhaps the lesbian is always mythic// palimpsest the most erogenous/ surface for conjecture /& erasure what was she doing in the moonlight/with all those women/ anyway scholars argue fiercely/ about carnality did they act on what they felt/ & what did they feel/exactly// which leads us invariably to/ who plucked whom footnotes discuss the strange dialect/ she uses Aeolic /Lesbic what if women’s/ writing of desire/ is always partly/ impenetrable/ on purpose// what if penetration is always actually/ancillary/to the act itself even her testimonium is/ so difficult/ to translate extant/ 650 lines/ of 10,000 likely written// extant/ a thousand times the lines/ of scholarship/ reducible/ to one persistent query was she or wasn’t she just when I think I can’t/ stand any more/ juvenilia did her codices recount/ climaxes & these/ brought forth by whose/ hands breasts tongues what eponymous pleasures/survive her papyri/ /intact or maybe it was /in the end/ just a lot of hot baths when Suzanne Sugarbaker said/ If we can put a man on the moon/ we can put a man on you//cue laugh track/ I laughed/ didn’t you they must finagle/ a formal way/ to ask/ was she a gold star or did she really fuck/ that ferryman when Will said to Jack/ I imagine it’s like bumper cars// cue laugh track/ I laughed/ didn’t you though I felt sorry for/ his poor/ imagination perhaps she was a school/ mistress// perhaps she presided/ over a literary coterie all women/ of course/ poetesses the word itself/ just another hoop skirt to go/ hopping through you better watch out/ they said/ /when I took the scholarship/ to the all-girls school they might try & turn you there into what/ a Catholic? think of the slant rhyme/ think of the modifier/ they must have felt compelled to use but then isn’t that what all the nuns are/ anyway?// cue the laugh track/ I didn’t laugh/ did you it sounded nice/ actually/ women living together/ in sanctioned company/ enough rosaries around/ to overcome suspicion// what else might those candles/ light/ inside the attic/ window? isn’t every ode/ an elegy/ reversed? song for what is loved/ song for what is lost same chorus who says fragments/ collected/ should form a gestalt why not each word-smudge/ a metonym? suppose she always/ wanted/ to be/ elusive nothing to see here/& so forth/ to the sorts inclined to parse & piece// a woman’s life/ like a rag-bag/ perhaps she only wanted to/ quilt/ herself patchwork & piebald/ kerchief calicoed/ over her head Pan/ Omni death suggested by/ suicide that Phaon again unrequited love/ for a man/ has been known to make women/ sympathetic perhaps the more tragic/ the less/ treacherous unless the story turns Children’s Hour it hardly matters/ then/ did they or didn’t they? someone always pays for same-sex scuttlebutt don’t mosaic me! don’t Matroyshka me! but they chose the word unwholesome/ for the whole/ in it my father on ancient history/ those wretched Greeks/ didn’t have Jesus/ to show them the way my mother on ancient history/ did they even have lipstick back then/ some way to help themselves? in the last line/ of the lone poem/ preserved entire/ how she entreats Aphrodite// Still be my ally! /as in/ to form an alliance/ to pledge an allegiance/ to give all in the name of another