J.D. McClatchy, "Tattoos"

Thanks, K, for sending this to me.

J.D. McClatchy, Tattoos

1.

Chicago, 1969

Three boots from Great Lakes stumble arm-in-arm
Past the hookers
And winos on South State
To a tat shack. Pissed on mai tais, what harm
Could come from the bright slate
Of flashes on he scratcher’s corridor
Wall, or the swagger of esprit de corps?

Tom, the freckled Hoosier farmboy, speaks up
And shyly points
To a four-inch eagle
High over the Stars and Stripes at sunup.
A stormy upheaval
Inside—a seething felt first in the groin—
Then shoves its stubby subconscious gunpoint

Into the back of his mind. The eagle’s beak
Grips a banner
Waiting for someone’s name.
Tom mumbles that he’d like the space to read
FELIX, for his small-framed
Latino bunkmate with the quick temper.
Felix hears his name and starts to stammer—

He’s standing there beside Tom—Then all three
Nervously laugh
Outloud, and the stencil
Is taped to Tom’s chest. The needle’s low-key
Buzzing fusses until,
Oozing rills of blood like a polygraph’s
Lines, there’s a scene that for years won’t come off.

Across the room, facedown on his own cot,
Stripped to the wais
Felix wants Jesus Christ
Crucified on his shoulder-blade, but not
The heart-broken, thorn-spliced
Redeemer of punk East Harlem jailbait.
He wants light streaming from the wounds, a face

Staring right back at those who’ve betrayed him,
Confident, strong
With a dark blue crewcut.
Twelve shading needles work around the rim
Of a halo, bloodshot
But lustrous, whose pain is meant to prolong
His sudden resolve to fix what’s been wrong.

(Six months later, a swab in Viet Nam,
He won’t have time
To notice what’s been inked
At nigh onto the sky’s open hand—palms
Crawling with Cong. He blinks.
Bullets slam into him. He tries to climb
A wooden cross that roses now entwine.)

And last, the bookish acned college grad
From Tucson, Steve,
Who’s downed an extra pint
Of cut-price rye and, misquoting Conrad
On the fate of the mind,
Asks loudly for the whole nine yards, a “sleeve”
An arm’s-length pattern of motives that weave

And eddy around shoals of muscle or bone.
Back home he’d signed
On for a Navy hitch
Because he’d never seen what he’s since grown
To need, an ocean which….
But by now he’s passed out, and left its design
To the old man, whose eyes narrow, then shine.

By dawn, he’s done. By dawn, the others
Have paid and gone.
Propped on a table-top,
Steve’s grappling with a hangover’s thumbscrew.
The bandages feel hot.
The old man’s asleep in a chair. Steve yawns
And makes his way back, shielded by clip-ons.

In a week he’ll unwrap himself. His wrist,
A scalloped reef,
Could flick an undertow
Up through the tangled swash of glaucous cyst
And tendon kelp below
A vaccination scallop’s anchored seaweed,
The swelling billow could heave

For twin dolphins to ride toward his shoulder’s
Coppery cliffs
Until the waves, all flecked
With a glistening spume, climb the collar-
Bone and break on his neck.
When he raises his arm, the tide’s adrift
With his dreams, all his watery what-ifs,

And ebbs back down under the sheet, the past,
The uniform.
His skin now seems colder.
The surface of the world, he thinks, is glass,
And the body’s older,
Beckoning life shines up at us transformed
At times, moonlit, colorfast, waterbone.

2.

Figuring out the body starts with the skin,
Its boundary, its edgy go-between,
The scarred, outspoken witness at its trial,
The monitor of its memories,
Pleasure’s flushed archivist and death’s pale herald.
But skin is general-issue, a blank
Identity card until it’s been filled in
Or covered up, in some way disguised
To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects
Are given, not chosen, and the gods
Whose repertoire of change—from shower of gold
To carpenter’s son—is limited.
We need above all to distinguish ourselves
From one another, and ornament
Is particularity, elevating
By the latest bit of finery,
Pain, wardrobe, extravagance, or privation
Each above the common human herd.
The panniered skirt, dicky, ruff, and powdered wig,
Beauty mole, Mohawk, or nipple ring,
The penciled eyebrow above Fortuny pleats,
The homeless addict’s stolen parka,
Face lift, mukluk, ponytail, fez, dirndl, ascot,
The starlet’s Lucite stiletto heels,
The billboard model with his brief at half-mast,
The geisha’s obi, the gigolo’s
Espadrilles, the war widow’s décolletage…
Any arrangement elaborates
A desire to mask that part of the world
One’s body is. Nostalgia no more
Than anarchy laces up the second-hand
Myths we dress our well-fingered goods in.
Better still perhaps to change the body’s shape
With rings to elongate the neck, shoes
To bind the feet, lead plates wrapped to budding breasts,
The Sadhu’s penis-weights and plasters,
The oiled, pumped-up torsos at Muscle Beach,
Or corsets cinched so tightly the ribs
Protrude like a smug, rutting pouter pigeon’s.
They serve to remind us we are not
Our own bodies but anagrams of their flesh,
And pain not a feeling but a thought.

But best of all, so say fellow travelers
In the fetish clan, is the tattoo,
Because not merely molded or worn awhile
But exuded from the body’s sense
Of itself, the story of its conjuring
A means defiantly to round on
Death’s insufferably endless emptiness.
If cave men smeared their bones with ochre,
The color of blood and first symbol of life,
The peoples ever since—Egyptian,
Priestesses, Mayan chieftains, woady Druids,
Sythian nomads and Hebrew slaves,
Praetorian guards and kabuki actors,
Hell’s Angels, pilgrims, monks, and convicts—
Have marked themselves or been forcibly branded
To signify that they are members
Of a group apart, usually above
But often below the rest of us.
The instruments come effortlessly to hand:
Fish bone, razor blade, bamboo sliver,
Thorn, glass, shell shard, nail, or electric needle.
The canvas is pierced, the lines are drawn,
The colors suffuse a pattern of desire.
The Eskimos pull a charcoaled string
Beneath the skin, and seadogs used to cover
The art with gunpowder and set fire
To it. The explosion drove the colors in.
Teddy boys might use matchtip sulfur
Or caked shoe polish mashed with spit. In Thailand
The indigo was once a gecko.
In mall parlors here, India ink and tabs
Of pigment cut with grain alcohol
Patch together tribal grids, vows, fantasies,
Frescos, planetary signs, pinups,
Rock idols, bar codes, all the insignia
Of the brave face and the lonely heart.

The reasons are both remote and parallel.
The primitive impulse was to join,
The modern to detach oneself from the world.
The hunter’s shadowy camouflage,
The pubescent girl’s fertility token,
The warriors lurid coat of mail,
The believer’s entrée to the afterlife—
The spirtitual practicality
Of our ancestors remains a source of pride.
Yielding to sentimentality,
Later initiates seek to dramatize
Their jingoism, their Juliets
Or Romeos. They want to fix a moment,
Some port of call, a hot one-night-stand,
A rush of mother-love or Satan worship.
Superstition prompts the open eye
On the sailor’s lid, the fish on his ankle.
The biker makes a leather jacket
Of his soft beerbelly and nailbitten hands.
The callgirl’s strategic butterfly
Or calla lily attracts and focuses
Her client’s interest and credit card.
But whether encoded or flaunted, there’s death
At the bottom of every tattoo.
The mark of Cain, the stigma to protect him
From the enemy he created,
Must have been a skull. Once incorporated,
Its spell is broken, its mortal grip
Lossened or laughed at or fearlessely faced down.
A Donald duck with drooping forelock
And swastikas for eyes, the sci-fi dragon,
The amazon’s griffon, the mazy
Yin-yang dragnets, the spiders on barbed-wire webs,
The talismanice fangs and jesters,
Ankhs and salamanders, scorpions and dice
Are all meant to soothe the savage breast
Or back beneath whose dyed flesh there beats something
That will stop. Better never to be
Naked again than not disguise what time will
Press like a flower in its notebook
Will score and splotch, rot, erode, and finish off.
Ugly heads are raised against our end.
If others are unnerved, why not death itself?
If unique, then why not immortal?
Protected by totem animals that perch
Or coil in strategic locations—
A lizard just behind the ear, a tiger’s
Fangs seeming to rip open the chest,
An eagle spreading its wings across the back—
The body at once both draws death down
And threatens its dominion. The pain endured
To thwart the greater pain is nothing
Next to the notion of nothingness.
Is that what I see in the mirror?
The vacancy of everything behind me,
The eye that now takes so little in,
The unmarked skin, the soul without privileges…
Everything’s exposed to no purpose.
The tears leave no trace of their grief on my face.
My gifts are never packaged, never
Teasingly postponed by the need to undo
The puzzled perfections of surface.
All over I am open to whatever
You may make of me, and death soon will,
Its unmarked grave the shape of things to come,
The page there was no time to write on.

3.

New Zealand, 1890

Because he was the chieftain’s eldest son
And so himself
Destined one day to rule,
The great meeting-house was garishly strung
With smoked heads and armfuls
Of flax, the kiwi cloak, the lithograph
Of Queen Victoria, seated and stiff,

Oil lamps, the greenstone clubs and treasure box
Carved with demons
In polished attitudes
That held the tribal feathers and ear drops.
Kettles of fern root, stewed
Dog, mulberry, crayfish and yam were hung
To wait over the fire’s spluttering tounges.

The boy was let in. It was the last day
Of his ordeal.
The tenderest sections—
Under his eyes, inside his ears—remained
To be cut, the maze run
To its dizzying ends, a waterwheel
Lapping his flesh the better to reveal

Its false-face of unchanging hostility.
A feeding tube
Was put between his lips.
His arms and legs were held down forcibly.
Resin and lichen, mixed
With pigeon fat and burnt to soot, was scooped
Into mussel shells. The women withdrew.

By then the boy had slowly turned his head,
Whether to watch
Them leave or keep his eye
On the stooped, grayhaired cutter who was led
In amidst the men’s cries
Of ceremonial anger at each
Of the night’s cloudless hours on its path

Through the boy’s life. The cutter knelt beside
The boy and stroked
The new scars, the smooth skin.
From his set of whalebone chisesls he tied
The shortest one with thin
Leather thongs to a wooden handle soaked
In rancid oil. Only his trembling throat

Betrayed the boy. The cutter smiled and took
A small mallet,
Laid the chisel along
The cheekbone, and tapped so a sharpness struck
The skin like a bygone
Memory of other pain, other threats.
Someone dabbed at the blood. Someone else led

A growling chant about their ancestors.
Beside the eye’s
Spongy marshland a frond
Sprouted, a jagged gash to which occurs
A symmetrical form,
While another chisel peck in the dye,
A blue the deep furrow intensifies.

The boy’s eyes are fluttering now, rolling
Back in his head
The cutter stops only
To loop the blade into a spiraling,
Puckered, thick filigree
Whose swollen tracery, it seems, has led
The boy beyond the living and the dead.

He can feel the nine Nothings drift past him
In the dark: Night,
The Great Night, the Choking
Night, the All-Brightening Night and the Dim,
The Long Night, the Floating
Night, the Empty Night, and with the first light
A surging called the War Canoe of Night—

Which carries Sky Father and Earth Mother,
Their six sons borne
Inside the airless black
The two make, clasped only to each other.
Turning onto his back,
The eldest son struggles with all his force,
Shoulder to sky, straining until it’s torn

Violently away from the bleeding earth.
He sets four beams,
Named for the winds, to keep
His parents apart. They’re weeping, the curve
Of loneliness complete
Between them now. The old father’s tears gleam
Like stars, then fall as aimlessly as dreams

To earth, which waits for them all to return
Here is the care
Of the dead, and his tears
Seep into her folds like a dye that burns.
One last huge drop appears
Hanging over the boy’s head. Wincing, scared,
He’s put his hand up into the cold air.