A question

How much of love is attention?

To notice is already a vow of a kind. The poems know this; the letters know it better.

• Equal to the Gods

  On Lesbos a speaker watches a man sitting opposite the beloved. The body undoes itself: tongue, fire, ears, sweat. The Greek survives. A complete letter does not.

• The Woman in the Deutzia Month

  Heian-kyō, 1003. A court woman writes of a prince in the third person, as if the life were already a tale. Waka go back and forth. The prince’s wife leaves. Moonlight is not the whole weather.

• A Hedge Away

  Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Gilbert lived a hedge apart. The letters and poems are intimate, queer-readable, and tangled in family. A modern book-title is not the name she gave her life.

• Ospreys

  Water, birds, a modest woman, longing. Later readers made a moral of proper marriage. The poem itself keeps fishing in the stream.

• Kiss Me Again

  Œuvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: sonnets, including “Baise m’encor.” The mouth on the page is certain. Whether one woman of Lyon wrote it is a living scholarly question. The poems survive either way.

• Dear Pete

  Walt Whitman meets Peter Doyle, a horsecar conductor, on a stormy night. The letters that follow are companionship: working-class, queer, daily, and not a secret the poems had failed to tell.