First Things RSS Feed - Amit Majmudar

Apophatic

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Not with the myth and phosphorus of metaphor. Not
with lines of force looped in true-love knots.
Not by dumping the urn and reading the ashes. Not
through sonic wantonness, but not

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Polutropos

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Sing, O Muse, of the man of many reverses,
the man with a mind of many winding ways,
turned around and turned away from home
there on the open labyrinthine sea,
of the man of many dodges, the windspun
weathervane of a wanderer, navigator
forever divagating, of the man with a mind
ingeniously devious, the man of many evasions,
the man who endured so many turnabouts,
whose route home was all diversions, switchbacks,
setbacks, backhanded by the winds,
of the multifarious seafarer,
the wayfinder lost on many detours,
O Muse of many tropes, sing.

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Søren

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500

He is a churchyard. In his grasses, crosses
Have blossomed once again, like quartered roses
That know the real crowns are made of thorns.
Redolent cedar, these, both kings and thrones
In one, and no, they aren’t marking graves.
Here is no fear and trembling. No one grieves.
No sickness unto death, no concept of
Anxiety. Just love, and works of love.
Beneath each cross a book lies open, seed
And sustenance and soil. When we sit
With one, we set off soaring, paragraphs
That carry us aloft, alight, like seraphs
Bearing us through the siren-harrowed air
To sing us closer to the hymn we are.

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Stormchild

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500

A raindrop mirrors
The whole typhoon
Stretched like a spoon
Upon her clear

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Mirror Work

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500

The peak that paints the lake
Is quick to break.

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Metamorphoses

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

A turkey, turnkey, turncoat, dovecote, dove
waddles and wavers and wings her way above,
metempsychoses, metamorphoses
crossing horizons, orisons, seasons, seas,

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Slowdown

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

On your thirtieth birthday, you find that your clothes
Belong to someone slimmer.
It’s like only your socks haven’t shrunk in the wash.
From then on, you remember
Undressing in front of a lover or mirror
To reach for the dimmer.

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Apres moi, le Deluge

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

You needn’t be born a Bourbon
To dream your funereal deluge,
Some climactic climatic disturbance
To rain out the end of your reign.

A desultory drizzle of tears
Is the most that most of us get,
Precious precipitation
But scarcely the torrent we merit.

We’d prefer a proportionate downpour
But will settle for rills swelling
And basements portentously flooded—

Though even some frustrated faucets
Would do, a drop in the pressure,
Ice in the pipes of the world.

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Triplicity

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Infinity
requires us
to count to three,

our calculus
and three-step proof.
Dust cubed is dust:

The sum of love,
unequalled, spans
the fingers of

a single hand.
The word, archaic,
still solves for man.

Those Aramaic
postulates hold”
the algebraic

is never old.
We do the math
to know the soul:

It’s not a myth,
it’s an abacus
thanks to which

resolving this
complexity’s
as easy as

one, two, three.

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Anchorite

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

It would seem, from the sound of it, slang
?In Her Majesty’s Navy, say, circa
?Trafalgar”the deckhand whose job was
?To heave-ho the anchor aboard,
?The chain like a slain sea serpent?
Collecting in coils behind him.

Or maybe a meteor fragment,
?Some glittery space-coal without
?Any real industrial uses”
?A novelty, anchorite, sold
?In the rock-box next to the quartzes
?At a science museum gift shop.

You would never imagine it wanted
?To sail in the other direction,
?A rare earth dreaming of heaven
?And pulling its rosary beads
?Like the links in a chain that leads
?To the sea floor, and the iron that anchors it.

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