Model City [3]

It was like moving into an apartment for the summer furnished only with a bed, a desk, a chair, and an old "world" radio in a brown case, its luminous dial turning to Moscow Berlin Paris Skopje Budapest London and Tangier.

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It was like lying in bed at night next to the world-radio, etched with distant cities, which now only gets local stations, and imagining lying in bed in Skopje in the middle of the last century listening to music from Paris.

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It was like lying under the open window thinking the apartment is not big enough, the summer is not big enough, the world is not big enough for the world-radio with its etched cities and its luminous ideals.

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It was like leaving the apartment at summer's end and sneaking the world-radio out in your suitcase, for you know that only you understand the radio's faith in a grander, more worldly world—and its inability to transmit it. 

-- Donna Stonecipher (via Poetry Daily)