Sunday in the Panopticon

I was sitting in Old Town Square

with tourists and birds and I was reading

Foucault, how “he who is subjected

to a field of visibility ... becomes

the principle of his own subjection”

and all around me the beautiful

Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first

day of spring like perennially

visible inmates in the opening credits

of a prison porno. The sun reflected off

the glass and my table was an inscrutable

tower of light from which I peered, invisibly,

at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr

across the stones, traveling, it seemed, to something

vaguely ridiculous and charmingly anachronistic:

cuff link shopping, or brunch with the duchess.

The coffee had made me jittery and I was beginning

to sweat from both sun and desire. I considered

moving to the outer edge of the circled tables, so the boys

could see me as I could see them, but then the 600-year-old

orloj sounded the hour and the twelve apostles

and skeletal death spun around and I was afraid

to leave my tower. I didn’t want to be visible

in the way those small dancing figures were visible and

as much as I wanted a handsome companion, I feared my foot

getting caught in a sewer grate or my spoon

falling from my saucer and clattering on the pavement,

startling the birds into a ruckus. An errant ball

of sweat fell from my chin and onto the page. I looked

down to where it had landed on the word “reciprocal”

which made me think how looking is always reducible to twos —

two eyes, two parties, two possible outcomes, and how

those who watch from the panopticon’s black pupil may,

in any case, not even exist.