The History of the Siren
after Gustav Wertheimer’s, “The Kiss of the Siren”
My mother’s loom stood open
upstairs in the old house
where I was not allowed to go
with ribs of yarn, some close
and some set far apart.
I longed to see the end
of what she wove, but
we moved out, packed up
all the scraps of fabric
and the loom became a ghost.
I’d been told of the women
who lived in the ocean
resting on rocks at the furthest
edges of the sea, their skin
a seafoam spectrum. I didn’t
ask my mother about them.
I sensed it was a thing
all women knew, like
no matter how much a man’s
story about them changed,
it wasn’t true. Some men
told that the women were lonely
because they were dangerous.
I was only jealous that when
a storm came up, they slipped
below the water and took
danger for their refuge.
It was known they lived on song
and when they opened their mouths,
water poured out. For centuries
men searched for ways to
kill them. When sailors saw
a siren rise and ride along
the boat side, plastered like
a starfish, her peach skin flayed
and pulsing, looking almost
dead but also like the only living
thing, the sailors’ mouths would
open and they’d lean out.
I think they envied
what their own dry throats
would never know: how it feels
to breathe right through the drowning.
By the time I was alive
the women had been written
into mermaids by men who
failed to tame them. But many
land women are also whales
and we know the language
they made up between them, the
calls that pierce the silence and the flesh,
the songs that are the key to
staying alive beneath the water.
By myself at day or night, I’d
climb away to lift my face up to
the sky and wait for her to open
her lips, for the water to fall down
into my mouth, the fountain of
sound reminding me
no matter how much I ate,
I would always be hungry.
published in the I Sing: The Body anthology, Juventud Press, July 2021