Theme

Ordinary

Breakfast, a cold, the price of cloth. The history of love is mostly this.

• 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.

• 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.

• Kimberley, 1897 to 1898

  Special Licence

  Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Motswana, courts Elizabeth M'belle, Mfengu, in a diamond town that does not make mixed families easy. They marry by special licence. The letters of the rocky courtship we paraphrase; the marriage we can date.

• 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.

• Ireland and Wales, late Georgian

  Plas Newydd

  Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left Ireland in 1778 and kept a household in Wales for fifty years. They used the language of friendship. Do not force a modern label as the only truth. Do not deny the intimacy.

• Qing China, late 18th century

  Six Records

  A failed clerk and a woman who arranged flowers write an ordinary Chinese marriage: jokes, pawned hairpins, shared moonlight, and the days after she is gone. Two of the six records are lost.

• 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.