AMIT MAJMUDAR

Agni: Two Poems

Agni

[Vedic God of Fire]

 1.
Never more bright-eyed than when it’s dark outside,
Never heavier-lidded than in daylight 

Like the sun is an interrogation lamp,
Like the light is acid splashed across my eyes. 

I have kept a fire deep inside myself to see by.
I am pouring in it all I am and will be. Svaha.

2.
Hostile cookfires constellated on a plain.
Hekatomb that beckons to the sprawling slain.
Bottle-stopper dishrag soaked in gas, ignited.
Family store on fire with the family still inside it.
                        Agni, wolfgod, God of pain.

Fire-eater’s morsel, gulped and gasped away.
Brandy brandishing the flash of its flambee.
Tiki torches touched together till they catch.
Lip-clipped cigarette descending to the match.
                        Agni, godpup, God of play.

 3.
I want to sculpt you out of what you are,
but my hands are scared of how you scour and scar
the hubris that would hold you, much less shape you.
You take the form of what cannot escape you
away. You take its colors, too, to all
one gray. I say your name and almost call
you Agony. Maker, in your image may
I be unmade. I know by end of day
you’ll be the killing kiln, my lumpen clay
placed on the pyre, fired. All I pray
for is an afterlife inside a star.
Agni, sculpt me into what you are.

4.
When I met my sister after her Saturday call shift, we sat down with our breakfasts and looked out the restaurant window at a mysterious black shikhara looming above the treeline. It tilted left, shifted on its unseen foundation, smokestone into smoke. Wouldn’t it be crazy, I said, if that were your apartment burning while we sat here eating bagels?—Her apartment, the first place since she walked seven times around the marriage fire just two months before with the husband whose name, translated from the Sanskrit, meant brilliance-god, meant Sun, while rice fed the mandala fire and the priest rattled off invocations to Agni no one could follow. Afterwards, she drove the two miles in our separate cars and surprise, fire engines crowded the apartment parking lot and the gray air smelled of no this can’t possibly be but it was

5.
Flammable amethyst.
Blastocyst
ablaze in amniotic
fuel.
Renewal.
Phoenix-
feather quill
pen tipped
with an acetylene nib.
Agnition.
Ancient engine.
Kindling’s kindred, king
of the mandala,
the hunger at its center.
Pollenspark. Ethereal
Catherine-wheel
that is a star,
thinking. Plethora
of epithets
and yet, and yet
they dim before the Sanskrit ones,
the funnest ones to say.
Saptajihvi: Seven-tongued.
Pavaka: Purifier.
Vahnir: One
Who Spirits Things Away.

6.
The counter’s bowl of spare change had congealed
into a glassy lump, the nickels sealed
inside. The floor was noiseless underfoot,
the ash a cushion, shallow puffs of soot
at every step. The plecko boiled in
the helplessly melting ice cube that had been
her fishtank. It was gone now, vanished with
her closet stacked waist-high with wedding gifts,
the fire deft, swift, almost nothing left.
I think a toaster made it through the theft.
The guy one floor below had stored a drum
of propane on his balcony. By some
mysterious act of God, his place was spared
when something ruptured and the propane flared.
The blast went upward, straight into my sister’s
apartment, cutting through the floor with scissors.
A wall was missing. In the open air,
we saw a crowd below had come to stare,
to watch the drama, not a tear to share—
They must have left the gas range on in there.
Nobody volunteered to help us salvage
the bikes and kitchen pans that dodged the ravage.
Not that we needed any help. Except
for the bikes and two appliances, she kept
none of the ash-stained bric-a-brac we carried,
nothing from that first month of being married.

7.
Offer your loves into the fire.
Love of your wife, love of your twin sons,
love of your eight-year-old daughter.
I will carry them to the Gods. But to do that,
I must carry them away from you.

Love of my shakti, love of my Lav and Kush,
love of my littlest one with the dimple in her right cheek.
Carry my three loves home to the Gods, Agni.
It may sound like I’m sobbing, but—Svaha.

Offer your loves into the fire,
the ones you brought with you from before your birth.
Love of language, love of symmetries and similes,
love of insonation, your mosaic music.

Love of poetry, then—Agni, glutton, burn
my books that no one ever read,
the books I haven’t written yet....
I swallow them all here, like an epileptic
swallowing his tongue. I quench them
against my tongue
like the fire-eating showman I am.
Tiring, those tyro’s pyrotechnics,
but if it’s not what I have loved,
it’s not a sacrifice. So here: Svaha. 

Now shave your head and focus on me, lotus
position, like your ancestors around
a mandala. The looking never gets old.
Neither do I. Your loves had soaked the kindling.
Strike your bones together for a spark. 

Cold comfort, what with three stilled swings in the park.
Tell me, Agni, when my loved ones offer
me into the fire, into the pyre,
where will you carry me? Will you
carry me to the Gods, or past the Gods?

Not to the limit. Into the limitless.
Not to the third eye. Into its witness.
I have taken your loves into safe keeping.
I am the fire that’s watered with weeping.
Out of the whythink. Into the smiling aha.
Just say it with me, love. Just say Svaha.

8.
The Buddha preached what Prince Siddhartha noticed in his hot youth: everything is on fire, and the fire is desire. The afternoon the apartment burned, my brother-in-law shook his head and murmured, You were going to drive up yesterday, weren’t you? Thank God you didn’t. We were both on overnight, we were safe, but you would have been in there when it happened.... I did not tell them what delayed me, what kept me deliciously safe in another city, but that was my hot youth, and I had caught fire the night before. I had sweat and melted in that fire, joined and welded in that fire, proving the Fire Sermon’s truth. A hotblooded night saved me from an early morning housefire. Not the first or only time she saved me, the woman I went on to marry, going seven times around the seven-tongued desire, purified by desire, by desire spirited away

9.
The ritual is the spiritual. Out of these lies, lead me to the truth.
I kneel and grind my fists into the ground, and my knuckles sputter, spark, roar.
Ohio maples flatten at my liftoff point, radial radiance, third-eye iris spokewheel
whose gaze I am, rocketing twin boosters fed on jetfuel-golden ghee,
twin pillars of sustaining Agni, ballistic into what is night here
but daylight, praylight there. Out of the darkness, lead me to light
on the other side of maya, on the yonder side of yearning
where I braille the Sun’s shapeshifting incinerator Vindhyas.
My tears evaporate off my eyes before I’ve even cried them, Agni: The sheen
of seeing lifts its see-through veil. Cauterize me where I’m not yet cut
here in the four-walled mandala of my home, my homa. Mach speed,
lightspeed, godspeed me to stillness, Agni forever ashiver.
Around a fire, a hunter became the first storyteller: By torchlight,
he daubed the ox onto a cave wall sunlight never stroked.
Around a fire, loss became the first ghost story: By torchlight,
grief stitched a gash in the heart sunlight could not heal.
Agni, carry me off, Agni, carry me home. Richness renewal is ritual:
My ancestors and I stare into the same fire at the same time,
feeding each other, down the yugas, what we feed the sacrifice.
Agni, link us, think us together. Out of death, lead me to immortality.

Vacha

                                                            [Vedic Goddess of Speech]

 1.
Make my tongue the scythe in a garden of liars.
Make my tongue a tunnel through water to smuggle my sculpted Gods to safety.
Make my tongue the bright spoon where the whole sky lies pooled.
Make my tongue both brandy and bitters, aceltylene and oxygen,
Torpedo and flare gun, knife and pomegranate, truth and dare.
Make my tongue a backlash that slices the whip hand off at its wrist.
Make my tongue a flash flood arcing out of a conch shell ten centuries on the same shelf.
Make my tongue strange to myself.

2.
I want to draw a stone up from the ground
where it is drowning.
I want to brush the dust
and smoothness off like tears 

until I’m looking at a face.
Her eyes will be blissfully shut,
dreaming this rescue, this rescuer,
a Chola bronze whose dance is her samadhi.

I will call her name, Speech.
She will not answer to it
until I do what I did to the stone
to the silence inside me.

Godspeed me to the Goddess. Speech,
help me speak beyond my reach.
I sculpt the sibyl syllable. Mother,
make the sound I’m sculpting matter.

3.
In the chat, the last speakeasy, we speak
samizdat. In the chat, we prisoners for life
exercise in a courtyard the size of our palms. In the chat
no vibe is verboten, no joke is tasteless, no lol is
in earshot of HR. In the chat,
in the sacred circle of the text bubble,
the hottest take is Vedic fire, no judgement,
for only total trust or total anonymity
can free speech. In the chat, we can get
each other fired with a screenshot, no job
security quite like mutually assured
defenestration. In the chat, speech frees
our eyes to roll, lips to curl, eyebrows to rise questioning
all the bullshit we have to nod along to
during the zoom call or the deep dive
or the training seminar or the noon lunch
or the PowerPoint or the performance review
or the team huddle or the department meeting.
In the chat, we are brave. In the chat, we speak truth,
just not to power. In the chat you would see us
for the wryly funny cynical visionary scofflaws we are
not free to be in this sham real life
which is really just millions of scared people
standing in a circle with thumb and forefinger
ready to pinch their neighbor’s trachea
for saying the new wrong thing out loud.

4.
My body falls. My skull
cracks its seed hull,
and a new shoot slips
between pursed lips— 

a new tongue, sentient,
a new song, hesitant.
The stem swells in the dark,
crusts over with bark,

branches out, becomes
a tree whose pith hums
a new song, fearless,
saying you’ve got to hear this

with never seen leaves
now evergreen leaves—
a speechtree, nourished
where my body perished,

bone-born like me
a hundred-tongued tree
basking in its sins,
lapping up the winds.

5.
When she took him like a cello between her thighs,
all the strings of him shivered and began to sound.
He had never been so attuned, so at one before
two mouths crushed one groan, no way to know
whose groan it was. Vocal cords shiver speech the way
wind shivers the dreamcatcher webbing a cave mouth.
Bow of straight black hair, soundhole at the center of love, O
mouths that make speech so that bodies might make love, who
composed this fugue that keeps getting lost in itself?
When he made her sound with nothing but his fingertips,
the partition between healing and harmony rubbed away.
They crushed one shout between their mouths
like a medicinal sprig between thumb and forefinger,
the ridges and whorls stained with a green fragrance.
Everything they touched was poetry after that
because all they touched was each other.

6.
My former lives have spread their fan
numberlessly in my hand.
Kings and deuces, jokers and queens
and every card that’s in between.
I wandered in so long ago,
tempted by the jingle and glow
here on the tourist-trap riviera
of this casino called Samsara.
The dealer’s at the table with me.
I mutter Hit me, hit me, hit me,
taking another, another, another
face card, bad draw, father, mother
as I am hit, and hit, and hit
with birth after birth, but still I sit
ruefully staring at the shoe.
Accruing cards is all I do.
It’s like I don’t know blackjack’s rules,
chanting Hit me like a fool
as I sob into my gin and juice.
The more I hold, the more I lose.
I want to get my losing done
but there’s no way to twenty-one
unless a lady (none can hold her)
places a hand upon my shoulder
and guides me to another game,
blows on the dice, whispers my name
as name and mind and migrant soul
I bet it all on one last roll.

7.
Invention loves to reminisce,
and knowledge is a rhyme
too long delayed to be heard as the sound
that twins the sound of this.

My hands take up the cobbler’s hammer
and shoe the meter’s feet,
apprenticed to none but memory,
who vouchsafed me this beat

two hundred years back, in Lvov,
two thousand, in Roman Gaul,
these hymns a coming home to her,
the Goddess I recall

in detail, supple syllables,
a taste that knows my tongue,
one whiff of her used-book-sale perfume
returning me to song.

8.
I don’t want to be reborn
as anything with eyes and feet
that has to fight
sleep all day, insomnia all night.
I’d like to be a tree
Somewhere far from
people, of course. Just me, perched
on a slope, a member in good
standing in a tribe of birch.
Yogic stillness by default.
Birds no longer leery of me
would sit on one of my many shoulders
and sing to me. The rain is on its way.
If I held my leafy arms out
three decades or so,
one might even weave atop my hand
its ticklish gift, a straw
saucer full of blue eggs.
My roots would splay underground
just as widely as my crown above,
a dumbbell nebula of balanced
darkness-thirst and light-thirst.
No one could hear us talk,
our chemical messages passing
underground, like poems in a tyranny.
My pollen, smoking gently off my body,
would elope into the wind.
My roots would brush and entwine
other roots, no way of knowing which
are whose, like braiding my hair
with a stranger’s. All our green hands
holding up the sun.

9.
These are your names, my Goddess.

Sprache, by which we reckon pantheons and aeons,
totting up one true gods like so many monies.
            Langue, as in lungo studio e grande amore,
the long study and great love poets give you.
            Lingua, which melts in my mouth into agua, water
that wets my lips before I pray to you.
            Glossa, which melts in my mouth into thalassa, the sea
encompassed in the spyglass of the spoken.

These are your names, my Goddess.
But first among them all
in my wordship’s mother tongue is 

            Vacha, softened and smoothed into la vache,
the wishgiving heifer, sacred for la leche.
Your mother tongue licks your baby onto his legs,
your mewling mooncalf poet: Vacha, vowel,
vocal: vol, flight, my winged words evolving
only as you select against or for them.
Goddess, grant me a vision. If not,
Goddess, grant me revisions
deft enough to stay aloft a spell. 

Sanskrit, brighter than a thousand
suns created all at once, fizzing
on my tongue.

English, alias Angrezi, fizzing
on my tongue to grazie.
Thank you, Goddess. Thank you.

Amit Majmudar newest novels in India are The Map and the Scissors (HarperCollins India, 2022), a historical novel about the rivalry between Jinnah and Gandhi, and Heroes the Colour of Dust (Puffin India, 2022), a children's book. A memoir will be released in the United States, Twin A (Slant Books, 2022), as well as an epic retelling to be released in India, The Mahabharata Trilogy (Penguin India, 2023).