My son wrote to me from Bangkok saying that when he’d arrived to have his ink done by
The legendary tattoo guru Jimmy Wong it wasn’t the sounds of a city & its chaos that he’d minded
Though friends he’d made following the Ring of Fire complained of it—he wrote to me on one of those
Old-fashioned light-as-air blue folding envelopes in a darker blue script & said
Instead it was the steady silence of God in Bangkok that rang in his ears as the needle buzzed
In the hand of the revered artist duplicating the exact design my son himself had drawn to be inked
Across his thick right bicep the image of a world suddenly stilled a globe gripped in the talons
Of an ancient dragon that had seized its prey with a leer of silver fangs & the echo of a thousand
Years of silence upon silence upon God’s silence rippling & deafening
The silence hollowing his own body as the needle etched the flesh & a rivulet of color seeped from his muscles
& he walked out of Jimmy’s into Bangkok’s clamor shaking still—the clapper of a just-rung temple bell