Horse Tattoo (2002)

By some defect of soul
I’ve got it all reversed:
my downs appeal,
forward steps appall.
For my first three years
I carried a strange birthmark,
a red heart with an arrow
through it, right over my heart.
Cute, eh? A woman who
babysat for me back then
once remarked to my mother,
he aint gonna be nuthin’
but a lover. Only the mark
was upside down. A backwards love.
May that’s why I like tattoos.
I got my first one of
a man riding a dolphin
etched on my left upper
arm in a greeny blue
right after my first marriage.
It replicates a figure from
my father’s chosen coat
of arms (fanciful at best),
some rebel spirit who
cruises between love and
iniquity. Years later
after a split with my second
wife a second tattoo
seemed necessary. I’d
always like the Uffington
Horse, that huge figure
carved into a chalk hillside
in England. It looks like a
horse, though locals swear
it represents the dragon
Saint George slew nearby.
Somehow that was apt:
having left home in a funk
of desire and drunkenness,
I had that careening spirit
carved into my right arm
not in red—as dragons go—
but instead in black, the
negative of that white ichor
which illuminates that
hill horse’s bones.
Well, I didn’t die of that
spirit—not yet—and I’m
working my way slowly
home again to my wife.
So the tattoo, I guess, is
an irony, the road eventually
not taken which only leads
to ruin. I’m branded by
the fires which drove me here:
Are they good or ill, or
simply mine? Am I some
inwarding beast mined
from love’s reversals?
I will never know for sure.
Today, I’m proud and fearful
of those markings: They light
the way ahead for me
with their weird, otherworldly glow,
balled makings with nowhere
right now to go.