Would You Like To See My Othr Tattoos? Poem by gershon hepner

“Would you like to see my other tattoos? ”
is a question that sadly I rarely am asked
by ladies who tantalize with distant views
of the ink in their skin which they’ve boldly unmasked.
I’d never say no if they asked me, of course,
for I’m not a prude, and I really would hate
for my fun to be spoiled by Levitical laws,
as in chapter nineteen––I mean verse twenty-eight,
though to break the next law, it’s in verse number twenty,
would be wrong, I believe; I’d not turn into harlot
my daughter for anything, though I like plenty
of floozies whose signs are tattoos that are scarlet.

Janet Maslin reviews “The Gargoyle” by Andrew Davidson (“Beyond Fiery Gates, All That an Inferno Allows, ” NYT, July 31,2008) :
As soon as this book has finished wallowing in degradation, things start looking up. Along comes a beautiful, mysterious visitor to the burn ward, a woman named Marianne Engel who is notable for several reasons: “those unsolvable eyes, ” “that riotously entangled hair” and that claim of having been born sometime around 1300 and raised in a German monastery. She is strangely but brightly chatty. (“That growth makes me think of the boils that come with the Black Plague.”) She is quite sure that she and the burn victim were close friends in their previous lives. How convincing is she? Well, she knows her medieval German texts, and she knows her Icelandic lore. (One of Mr. Davidson’s sources in this exotically diverse book is the Web site vikinganswerlady.com.) She knows what a scriptorium’s armarius is. She knows how to carve gargoyles with great passion (“Gargoyles ache to be born”) and to contemplate the Eternal Godhead and its relationship to human creatureliness. Best of all she knows that nobody has ever answered in the negative to the question “Would you like to see my other tattoos? ”


7/31/08