© Steve King
All rights reserved
My wife came home to me last
night
and she unveiled the new tattoo.
She hid it well beneath the
folds
of the plain fabric of her
blouse.
I blushed at it so naively—
to know that night another
hand
had left this mark upon her
form;
to know another’s eye
surveyed
and measured out the pure
canvas.
I did not ask to know his
name,
just happy that he didn’t
sign
his artwork with some grand flourish.
“What do you think?” she finally
asked.
But I was not thinking just then:
she had been changed—had changed
herself,
without the least of letting
on
that any change would soon be
due.
The artwork was a tiny orb
encircling a tight spiral
of flashing, enprismed color,
a captive rainbow gathered round
within the unknown stranger’s
hold.
“It’s me,” she boasted. She smiled.
“And, no, I wasn’t even
drunk.”
Her laughter echoed in the
words.
She was so pleased with the
new ‘her’
she’d found there amid the many
strange waiting
possibilities.
So I agreed. “Yes, it is you.”
I didn’t picture how she
could
see within the small talisman
such a beautiful reflection.
Should I be looking there for
her?
Must I reintroduce myself
as someone else, unknown and new?
The calling card upon her
skin
appeared inflamed, and tinged
with blood.
Had she not explained it to
me,
I would have seen it as a
wound.
“Doesn’t this new ‘you’ come
with pain?”
“Not very much. I was surprised.
I had so fixed my mind on it,
the much greater pain would
have been
to find a convenient excuse,
rationalize my way again
to doing nothing whatever.
I’m sorry that I never
thought
to say a word of it to you.
It was only a lark at first,
and without anticipation;
no planning or pretense in it.
There was only the empty
space.
I am trying to make sure sense,
but I had never come against
a sudden thought like that
before.
An emptiness? So…awaiting?
What words were these to lead
desire?
Empty of what, I could not
say.
And why would not it be empty?”
It is no more an empty place.
And she must now exert her will
to fathom fully that new self
--the one that cannot be
explained--
in the dark circle closing
round
the fresh-born colors in her
life.
I too will gain a sense of it,
as I behold the new stranger
now brandishing this bold
palette.
It’s not for me just a mirror
reflecting exotic colors.
Not an impulsive thing,
unthought,
nor a quick reckoning of
whim.
A former world has indeed
changed
by more than just a needle’s
span:
so, too, in those musings I
had
while waiting upon her return
last evening, when all was
well,
when the blank spaces still made
sense,
before the time she’d shed her
blouse
and donned another world anew.
