Theme

Distance

Miles do not merely separate. They change what a voice can carry, and what a hand can mean.

• Gupta-period India

  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.

• High Roman Empire

  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.

• England and Rome, 1819 to 1821

  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.

• Te Arawa oral tradition

  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.

• Massachusetts and Philadelphia

  Remember the ladies

  She wants a letter half as long as the ones she sends. The farm is hers. The children are still well. He is in Philadelphia. In the same sheet, later, she asks him to remember the ladies. The slogan is not the morning. The wait is.