Theme

Longing

The stretching of the self toward an absence that has a name.

• 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.

• 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.