Theme

Forgiveness

The unglamorous labor of remaining in relation after harm.

• Twelfth-century Paris

  Héloïse Will Not Be a Plot

  A teacher, a student, a secret marriage, then a mutilation. The Latin that survives is not a romance. It is her refusal to let desire be converted into a useful wound.

• 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.

• 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.

• Levant, first millennium BCE

  Rise Up, My Love

  Desire entered the sacred canon and never agreed to leave. Jews and Christians have read it as allegory. The Hebrew still smells of myrrh and the bed at night.

• Washington, from 1865

  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.