Theme
Waiting
Love has always known how to occupy the hours in which the other does not arrive.
Heian Japan
A Gossamer Life
A wife in a polygamous Fujiwara marriage keeps a record of being left to wait. The diary is not a romance of patience. It is what neglect looks like from inside the house.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you love me you will
From a former priory in Bedfordshire, Dorothy Osborne writes to a man the house does not want. The file that survives is almost only hers. The letter is how the days were spent.
Song China, early 12th century
Yi Jian Mei
Li Qingzhao writes Song lyric while Zhao Mingcheng is away, and later after he is dead. The feeling leaves the brow and climbs the heart. The two weathers are not the same poem.