Theme

Letters never sent

The sentence that stayed in the drawer, still addressed.

• Amherst, mid-nineteenth century

  A Hedge Away

  Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Gilbert lived a hedge apart. The letters and poems are intimate, queer-readable, and tangled in family. A modern book-title is not the name she gave her life.

• Teplitz, July 1812

  Unsterbliche Geliebte

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

• 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.

• Heian Japan

  The Woman in the Deutzia Month

  Heian-kyō, 1003. A court woman writes of a prince in the third person, as if the life were already a tale. Waka go back and forth. The prince’s wife leaves. Moonlight is not the whole weather.

• Tibet, Sixth Dalai Lama

  The Songs Below the Palace

  Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama, wrote songs of lovers and willow groves while holding a religious office. The tension is real. The later death is political and grim. It is not a lyric.