The Siren Is a Rectangle

I.
I was built for a slower century.
Give me a sea that takes six weeks to cross
and a letter that has to survive the crossing,
a love that must be certain to be worth the ink.
I have hands that want the long way around,
feet that want to go and find out,
a body that believes a thing
only once it has stood inside it.

I was a lover before I was anything else.
Not the kind who waits by the window.
The kind who leaves by it.

II.
Odysseus had rope. Odysseus had wax
and twelve men to lash him to the mast.
The siren now is a rectangle.
She sings from every palm at once
and no one is tied to anything,
and the song is of people we know,
which is worse than any myth,
because the shadows on this cave wall
wave back.

They do not need to control a mind.
They only need to rent its evenings.
The lotus is served warm, in portions,
timed to the hour you are weakest.
Everybody forgetting home
while sitting at home.
Everybody looking at a window
that only ever shows the room.

III.
I have been loved through glass.
I have sat across a table from a face
that was elsewhere, lit from below,
thumb moving like a rosary,
and understood, slowly, that I was competing
with a thousand strangers’ thighs and brunches
and would lose, not because I was less,
but because I was finite,
and the feed is not.

The world is trained to appreciate quantity
Excess, and accessibility
And I still hold the same pen until it breaks
The same phone until it no longer turns on
The Last Romantic is lost amongst sheep.

I don’t want to be looked at through a lens.
I want a face to do the looking.
Attention was the only currency I ever wanted
and they printed so much of it
it buys nothing now.

I miss being hidden,
In New York City,
Where those who loved me
Meant it, truly.

IV.
So I go.
I take the body they tried to make a screen of
and put it on a train.
I let a city not know my name.
I let the moon do what it does,
which is move water, not minds,
and I am mostly water,
and I go where I am pulled.

Thirty countries and I still blush at a kindness.
Still write the long letter no one asked for.
Still kiss no one in Italy
and call it a love story anyway,
because it was: the piazza, the rain, the lobster,
the being there with my whole face.

V.
I know what I am.
A stowaway from the previous age,
smuggled into this one in a woman’s body,
asked at every border to declare my devices.
I decline the box. Quietly.
Quiet was never the same as unsure.

When the glass goes dark it becomes a mirror,
and a mirror is not a window,
and I was made for windows,
for the kind of looking that leaves a mark.

Somewhere a ship is still leaving.
I intend to be on it,
hair undone, a letter half-written,
loving someone the old way:
out loud,
and with my feet.

Devoted in the way that doesn’t exist anymore,
But I suspect I am not alone.
And so, I search — 197 countries.