A question

What is an unanswered love still doing?

It is not necessarily waiting. It may be making a language, a life, a refusal, a god.

• Unsterbliche Geliebte

  In July 1812 Beethoven writes, in pencil, to a woman he calls immortal. The letter stays with him. Her name does not.

• A Gossamer Life

  A wife in a polygamous Fujiwara marriage keeps a record of being left to wait. The diary is not a romance of patience. It is what neglect looks like from inside the house.

• The Man Who Went to the Wilderness

  At Ganja, Nizami took an Arab legend and made a Persian wound: Qays named mad for Laylā, then named by the desert. The poem loves its grief. It does not have to be a model.

• Two Luxuries

  John Keats writes to Fanny Brawne of her loveliness and of the hour of his death. The first is the love. The second is a fact he could not bargain with.