the tattoo artist

dooryard
from the stone barn
shaker village
hancock, mass

the tattoo artist

Answers are just echoes, they say.  But

a question travels before it comes back,

and that counts.

                                                William Stafford

                                                The Research Team in the Mountains

I wonder that I wrote the same

way years ago but now it sounds

brand new like I’d never heard or

considered it but funny it’s familiar

enough that’s exactly what I do

I wonder and what’s the difference

between wonder and suspicion but

one has innocence and the other

accusation?  They both of them see us

in the mirror in the clear pond

they watch us and wait and take

us on or back away both

the only thing they could do

in that moment.  So it was yesterday

I saw the woman who marked

me for the entire rest of my life

and she drove by and I watched

her take traffic in remarkable

patience, like rising blood

coming up from the just under

the some two layers of skin so she

could lay down my mark the one I’d

asked her for the one I’d taken

out of my imagination and said

this and she said ok and she

sprayed me clean and she made me

painful enough she made me want

to stay and stay and stay the way

a flagellant may want to while

outside someone somewhere

was filling in a grave, or orioles

were at a flowering bush and coming

away with beetles or flying up

to the screen to make a moth stop

dead, or waiting (because I came

back later too, with other needs to be

marked) the ink, the soap, I think of all

what else they plunder while over

and over the mark is made permanent

and nearly forever: A phoenix.  A dragon.

A Buddhist mantra.  I’m watching her

cover for me when I have to leave

the room when I am sick of being

brave and waiting.  But when she

goes over the wrist bone with her

needle, and it’s close enough to

where you touched the place I’d made

myself come out of myself and you

brought it to your lips and kissed it

I watched the birds in your yard

come to  you in the way any animal

came to your favorite saint who made

any feather, any scale, wounded

or whole and free, easy enough

at ease.  Their wonder was

their only question and they put it

down like ink that only came good

when they left, blessed maybe

or maybe not, healed maybe or

maybe not, but brave at least

and staying that way, past the shame

they came in with, their leaving

now their delicate silica.