Jordan Smith: Tattoo

The tattoo place was in the strip mall
Between the pizza shop and the liquor store,
Where all during Covid he bought
His tequila because the owner played
Old blues on the stereo and kept his distance
Friendly and when they reopened
He would almost go in, but he couldn’t decide
If it made any sense at all at his age, and after
So much impermanence and elegy,
Not to mention the ratio of demographics
To depreciation, when what he had in mind
Was as fleeting as memory, on his forearm,
In the medieval style of the tiles on the floor
Of St. Chapele, a greyhound, weight on the left
Foreleg, the right crossing it, raised
In tentative invitation to whatever
Offered, head reversed to see what follows
Or might be followed, the haunches
Braced for the hunt which is also flight
And that was how he’d hoped to live, attentive
And poised, but for those two years, all
That steadied him were three shots
While cooking dinner and the photos he took
On the deck, dark masses of trees, bright
Moon or clouds in shadow, neighbor’s
Lights, and beyond the peepers and cicadas
A silence he could only imagine as the world
Emptying itself of any consciousness
Language might capture, each and every
Night gone further past the phone’s lens,
Past the black chain-link fence, where once
A doe’s eyes flared green in his flashlight,
And he remembered Wyatt’s whoso list
To hunt, and he knew then, as he entered
The tattoo place that if he couldn’t afford
The hound, he’d settle for just the words, since
In a net I seek to hold the wind.

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Copyright 2025 Jordan Smith

Jordan Smith’s many books include Little Black Train, winner of the 2019 Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and Salmagundi.

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