A question

What does distance do?

Some loves are born of distance. Some are deformed by it. A few become writing, which is another kind of crossing.

• The Cloud Messenger

  An exile on a hill asks the monsoon to carry a message to a wife on a mythic mountain. The route is half the poem. Distance is not what the lovers suffer. It is what the verse is made of.

• The Empty Threshold

  She is in Campania for her health. He rereads her letters, walks to the room where she sat, and writes as if the wax could keep her. Her side of the correspondence does not survive.

• 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.

• The Swim to Mokoia

  Hinemoa hears Tūtānekai’s flute across Lake Rotorua and swims to Mokoia Island. This is Te Arawa oral narrative, still living with a people, not a fairy tale taken from a New Zealand map.