Theme

Desire

The body leaning toward what it has not been promised.

• Archaic Greece

  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.

• Lyon, French Renaissance

  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.

• Sena-period Bengal

  When He Dances Elsewhere

  Jayadeva sings Rādhā’s waiting while Krishna stays among the gopīs. In this poem the sacred and the erotic refuse to be sorted. Viraha is not a plot delay. It is the devotion.

• New Kingdom Egypt

  Sister Without Rival

  On the back of a New Kingdom roll now in Dublin, a young man and a young woman take turns. They call each other brother and sister. They mean lovers.

• Sangam Tamilakam

  Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  In classical Tamil, love has landscapes. A woman asks what kin her family was to his, then answers with monsoon and red soil. The poem is not anonymous India. It is akam, and it is Tamil.

• Taifa-period al-Andalus

  I Go My Way with Pride

  An Umayyad princess-poet in Córdoba took lovers in public and wrote in her own name. The affair with Ibn Zaydūn burned, then tore. She is not his muse. She is the other poet.