Opus

Oh, Ophelia

One Saturday afternoon,
drunk on the haze heat and ennui
You wanted to draw a tattoo on my shoulder.

I let you.

You tried to draw my face. You said
it would be a parallel portrait,
so that when I looked over my shoulder I would
be face to face with myself.
You thought it was a brilliant idea.
I don't think you even knew what you were
talking about. I said it was dumb,
but you drew on anyway
With soft-blue fingertips as tender as frostbites.
The dust swirled in sunbeams
almost conversing, whispering of
star-secrets, how moons fall on foamy seas.

Outside, the afternoon dragged on the sidewalk,
People shuffled their feet and looked
for the meaning of life
in exalted abstractions.
Oblivious to us, a world of our own
on this side of the window.
A moment, green laughter and snow-quiet sleep.
Our voices, hushed and seeped into yellow walls.

When you were done,
the girl on my shoulder looked
nothing like me.

Her one eye was bigger than the other,
and she had no feet.
You said it was symbolic.
I decided I'd call her Ophelia.

She washed away the next time I had a bath.

I remembered the summer, the year before last
we had run away to the mountains.
Did we really run away, or did I just
dream of it?
You said it didn't matter,
pulled me in closer till I shivered
like a rose sand lover in your arms.

That Saturday afternoon,
we lay back to back and talked of love
stories in dusty book-fair paperbacks
Till the shadows danced on the landscape
of your face like a reverie, a dream recalled
from another time, of another
universe in lilac-scented clouds.

The sun set over the the city,
and it was time for me to go.