A Poem by Amit Majmudar

The Diwan

i. Artifice

Rhymes are rising through my grief like bubbles through champagne.
If it doesn’t age a bruise, it isn’t true champagne.

Damn you, ghazal, give me news I can drink to.
The truth is vinegar in lieu of champagne.

I, too, have faked loss for the sake of an elegy.
I longed for my own Lycidas. I loved to sham pain.

Now I’m really crying, but I feel I’m crying wolf.
I turn wine into water and tears into champagne.

“Is grief crushing you, Amit? Might as well try and fizz a little.
There’s no such thing as ambrosia. The best we can do is champagne.”

 
ii. Where Do You Call Home?

Another old folks home, another Cracker Barrel in Ohio.
I’ve sternal-rubbed two Marvs, one Irv, and three Meryls in Ohio. 

The harder we pursue Damascus
The faster blood bedews Damascus.

I never moved. I never moved on. Guess that’s what I get
For eating a pomegranate aril in Ohio. 

Temple of Jove, Church of John the Baptist, Ummayad Mosque:
Time rechristens each Damascus New Damascus.

Fifteen years of fentanyl silts the water table.
Nothing ensouled stays fierce or feral in Ohio. 

The ruins stayed the same; it’s just the Architect who changed.
The place where we interred our place names grew Damascus.

 Come July, charcoal and popping grease can make this Hindu lick his chops.
The neighbors slipped me an all-beef patty off their grill in Ohio. 

The optometrist with flecks on his tie adores his wife.
Does Damascus remember there’s no one true Damascus?

 
In mittens and a red plaid hunting hat with earflaps,
I, too, belted out Christmas carols in Ohio. 

Pleasure dilates their pupils the size of bullet holes.
They watch news of Damascus in lieu of Damascus.

 Yard signs go up: Something’s rotten in Columbus. Soon
Women will be better off sterile in Ohio. 

Pilgrim, faith is a palimpsest. Do not turn away.
Your road to Damascus must take you through Damascus.

I know my place. I know my place is here. Still
I know I must stay careful in Ohio.

iii. Whether, How Much, and When

The word is the woman. She houses the yes more now.
My tongue draws into its radius her yes more now.

In her body, I hold a temple’s memory.
Every prayer sets a tryst with the yes more now.

Her breath, hot against my ear, swirls me into pollen.
Come dawn, we’re wildflowers saying yes to yes more now.

My tongue lives in exile when it’s not between her teeth.
I’ve waited twenty centuries for this, her yes more now.

The woman is the word. I have married into mystery.
She bites his tongue. I bleed honey when I kiss the yes more now.

iv. Half the Time

Forty years old! Best case, I’m left with half my time.
Other poets master this craft in half the time.

Time gets away in a slate-gray Saab with clockface wheels.
By the time I check my wristwatch, I’m bereft of half the time.

What sounds like a fire brigade is just another clown car.
I mourn this country but can’t help laughing half the time.

Am I Eastern or Western? Archaic, or from the future?
I wear a spacesuit under a kaftan half the time.

Forty years old. My bookish posture wilts me forward.
I’m crushed beneath the lessening heft of half my time.

The number goes up, but every birthday feels like theft—
I’d be thankful for a banker’s draft on half the time.

Is senescence sneaking up on me?
May Zeno’s arrow forever halve the time.

Excuse these insomniac, slaphappy, sloppy rhymes—
Amit’s shoestring-budget brain is fully staffed just half the time.

v. Chokechain

I bring you here to breathe a thing
I cannot bring myself to think.

The pressure of a word unspoken
Breaks my chokechain into links.

December flurries: Catch a secret on your tongue
And time will grow a pearl for you to string.

Spiked leather, pearl choker—a ghazal always snaps her collar.
Dissolve your pearls in me, Clio, till I’m sweet enough to drink.

Piano wire, strung with lotuses.... They swear it’s a garland.
Amit knows damn well it’s a garrotte. But he chooses to sing.

vi. Tessellation

No one will warm to a pattern you’ve woven
If you forget to work the love in.

Love works itself out, no Euclidean proof required,
The prime, the irrational constant, the given unproven.

When I tiptoed, a thief, through the house of belief,
Love invited me to move in.

A dash in the feed bag won’t grow your Arabian wings—
When it comes to love, you have to put enough in,

But Amit, once your horse is in the air,
Not even Buraq will rocket above him.

vii. All Too Short a Date

Crutches end as driftwood, skulls as shells ascuttle on this shore.
Photographers snap them up. Publication is erasure.

White waves mark a border no one can uncross.
The last few sneakers are still washing ashore.

Some thought the lighthouse might be high enough
To call the dead to prayer. Now they’re not as sure.

I distrust these poets of the latest crisis. I know all too well
How topicality tickles the tongue with a fizz of pleasure.

Amit, wade in shoeless, and feel the saltwater slap your shins.
You can play with meters once high tide has taken your measure.

viii. “Th’ Expense of Spirit in a Waist of Shame”

This god gob of lust pus, this fillip of fluid
Becomes a man in full, half-fledged angel, soul fleshed

Out for good or ill. Hell, more for ill than good, but still,
A miracle in the making, and once made, well-built:

No wonder he plundered jungles for meat, no wonder
The animals felt his heartbeat underhoof and fled

The natural disasters that serve his mind and hand.
Strike the rock with a staff: Behold, he comes in full flood,

Pallid distillate, spit and spirit, seven ounces
All counted. Give him time, he’s a clump of fish eggs, flecked

With round black dots like eyes. Give him time, he’s a bulbous
Head, notchy spine, inturned feet, slit-gilled neck, flimsy legs,

Fingers webbed, drinking mother’s blood to its red dregs,
Placenta latched and through a thousand leech-mouths fed.

ix. City on a Hill

Midnight. I see a man in a trilby and monocle before me,
Commanding, Thou shalt have no other devils before me.

Care package or parcel bomb, I’m so lonely
I keep hoping the next one will be for me.

In this city on a hill, or should I say burial mound,
The children of killers play King of the Hill before me.

I told him, “Tonight’s on me, man, it’s your last supper.”
Is it my fault that he reached for the bill before me?

My daughter was born with tiny Venetian blinds in her neck.
A surgeon threw stitches through her blinking gills before me.

The only drug I’ll do is one that writes me better ghazals.
Damn that Hafiz—he got here first and popped the pills before me.

x. Photographing the Cremations

I wake up eight thousand miles away to find it
trending: India. India fractured and casted, redolent
with Dettol, always broken always mending India.
Predator drones overfly the pyres, hunting for a Pulitzer.
When they shoot the dead, they shoot to kill. Ghosts
are always pressing Send in India. India so far east she’s
west now, India robbed blind for so long, all
she loves is bling—while I, a holy fool, I speak
of atman when defending India. I’ve got 
a blue passport and this slow Midwestern drawl,
but neither’s kept me from befriending India.
In the temples, grandmothers offer marigolds,
and politicians offer tax bills. When they aren’t rending
India, they’re getting and spending India. India dresses up
its dead little girls in red and gold, child brides
for King Yama—sobs and prayers, drones and smoke
ascendant. “India,” they tell me, “is where all the stories
started out. We know you weren’t born here,
Amit. Still, come home.” I tell them what I tell
myself: India’s story will not end in India.

xi. Infidel

Could love have been my real faith?              
             Was I a kafir all along?
Those Sufi shrines I wandered out of...
             That bluest mosque I lost my way to....

Now nothing’s left but wanderlust.
             Okay: there’s lust lust here as well;
And words, for a wayward Beloved.
             (Though I’ve been faithless in my day, too.)

There are as many loves as hearts—
             Why not as many truths as minds?
If there is One and only One,
             Why do my instincts venerate two?

Not even Orpheus could strum
             The heartbeat back into his idol.
Kafir, her heart is spoken for.
             Go find some other stone to play to.

Female and male began as one.
             Eros carved them up, says Plato—
That God of chainsaw massacres
             I rip my ribs apart and pray to.

xii. Ars Poetica

“Get with the times already, Amit! Abandon discipline!”
My anarchic, anachronistic passion? My discipline?

No way. My mind’s an elegantly rhyming elephant in rut.
I exasperate chaos with my gamely grinning discipline.

Notice, everywhere you turn: abandon. If you must,
Feel free to look away from my indecent discipline.

I ask of indulgence only that she be demanding. What’s
My fantasy? Reckless, hot, abundant discipline.  

Sure I’ll drink that. I’ll do anything on a dare.
My mind walks water with a wind’s abandon. 

The singers spin while those outside the circle stare,
Rapture a language they have long since abandoned.

Love is scarce, angels are extinct, but rhyme I find in abundance.
“What’s your secret, Amit?” No secret. Just disciplined abandon.

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said (Alfred A. Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com.