Dothead Read online

  ALSO BY AMIT MAJMUDAR

  The Abundance (a novel)

  Partitions (a novel)

  0°, 0° (poems)

  Heaven and Earth (poems)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Amit Majmudar

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Majmudar, Amit.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Dothead : poems / Amit Majmudar.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-94707-4 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-101-94708-1 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3613.A3536A6 2016

  811’.6—DC23 2015020310

  eBook ISBN 9781101947081

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v4.1

  a

  It is fun to have fun

  But you have to know how.

  —Dr. Seuss

  KEDGEREE INGREDIENTS

  Cover

  Also by Amit Majmudar

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  DOTHEAD

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF KHWAJA MUSTASIM

  T.S.A.

  ODE TO A DRONE

  DYNASTY

  THE ILLUMINATOR

  THE INTERROGATION

  IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION

  TRAINING COURSE

  KILLSHOT

  THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE WESTERN CANON

  TO THE HYPHENATED POETS

  THE STAR-SPANGLED TURBAN

  WINGED WORDS

  HIS LOVE OF SEMICOLONS

  STEEP ASCENSION

  THE BOY WHO COULDN’T GROW UP

  RUNE POEM

  HORSE APOCALYPSE

  ABECEDARIAN

  SEX

  TO ANNE SEXTON

  LOVE SONG FOR DOOMED YOUTH

  THE DOLL

  CROCODILE PORN

  JOINT EFFORT

  THE TOP

  SAVE THE CANDOR

  THE METAMORPHOSIS

  LINEAGE

  WELCOME HOME, TROOPS!

  ARE YOU HUNGRY?

  TASTE BUD SONZAL

  DYSTOPIARY

  1914: THE NAME GAME

  BLACK HANDS

  JAMES BOND SUITE

  1. THE ASTRONOMY OF BOND GIRLS

  2. THE SHORT AND HAPPY LIFE OF PLENTY O’TOOLE

  3. HYMN TO SEAN CONNERY

  IN A GALLERY

  ET TU

  LOGOMACHIA

  a. NEUROSCIENCE

  b. ERASURE OF THE FINAL SCENE OF KING LEAR (I)

  b. ERASURE OF THE FINAL SCENE OF KING LEAR (II)

  a. RADIOLOGY

  c. STEM CELLS

  d. HERETICAL FUGUE

  d. SHADOW-CROSS FUGUE

  c. PANDEMIC GHAZAL

  e. THE WALTZ OF DESCARTES AND MOHAMMED

  f. FE

  g. HOLY

  g. DEVOLUTION

  f. “THERE FELL A GREAT STAR”

  e. HIDE AND SEEK

  AUGUSTINE THE HIPPO

  RIMBAUD IN HARAR

  RECOMBINANT FAIRY TALE

  KENNEWICK MAN ELEGY

  PATTERN AND SNARL

  FROM THE EGG

  INVOCATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Note About the Author

  DOTHEAD

  Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.

  I know they said “third eye” in class, but it’s not

  an eye eye, not like that. It’s not some freak

  third eye that opens on your forehead like

  on some Chernobyl baby. What it means

  is, what it’s showing is, there’s this unseen

  eye, on the inside. And she’s marking it.

  It’s how the X that says where treasure’s at

  is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.—

  All right. What I said wasn’t half so measured.

  In fact, I didn’t say a thing. Their laughter

  had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after

  World History; that week was India—myths,

  caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits.

  The white kids I was sitting with were friends,

  at least as I defined a friend back then.

  So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot?

  I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd—

  She wear it to the shower? And to bed?—

  while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad

  was getting ready for another stab.

  I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there.

  And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear,

  and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked

  circles till the red planet entered the house of war

  and on my forehead for the world to see

  my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats,

  their flesh in little puddles underneath,

  pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF KHWAJA MUSTASIM

  I stood for twenty years a chess piece in Córdoba, the black rook.

  I was a parrot fed melon seeds by the eleventh caliph.

  I sparked to life in a Damascus forge, no bigger than my own pupil.

  I was the mosquito whose malarial kiss conquered Alexander.

  I bound books in Bukhara, burned them in Balkh.

  In my four hundred and sixteenth year I came to Qom.

  I tasted Paradise early as an ant in the sugar bin of Mehmet Pasha’s chief chef.

  I was a Hindu slave stonemason who built the Blue Mosque without believing.

  I rode as a louse under Burton’s turban when he sneaked into Mecca.

  I butchered halal in Jalalabad.

  I had been a vulture just ten years when I looked down and saw Karbala set for me like a table.

  I walked that lush Hafiz home and held his head while he puked.

  I was one of those four palm trees smart-bomb-shaken behind the reporter’s khaki vest.

  I threw out the English-language newspaper that went on to hide the roadside bomb.

  The nails in which were taken from my brother’s coffin.

  My sister’s widowing sighed sand in a thousand Kalashnikovs.

  I buzzed by a tube light, and three intelligence officers, magazines rolled, hunted me in vain.

  Here I am at last, born in a city whose name, on General Elphinstone’s 1842 map, was misspelt “Heart.”

  A mullah for a mauled age, a Muslim whose memory goes back farther than the Balfour Declaration.

  You may remember me as the grandfather who guided the gaze of a six-year-old Omar Khayyám to the constellations.

  Also maybe as the inmate of a Cairo jail who took the top bunk and shouted down at Sayyid Qutb to please please please shut up.

  T.S.A.

  Off with the wristwatch, the Reeboks, the belt.

  My laptop’s in a bin.

  I dig out the keys from my jeans and do

  my best Midwestern grin.

  At O’Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth,

  it happens every trip,

  at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles,

  the customary strip

  is never enough for a young brown male

  whose name comes up at random.

  Lest the randomness of it be doubted, observe

  how Myrtle’s searche
d in tandem,

  how Doris’s six-pack of Boost has been seized

  and Ethel gets the wand.

  How polite of the screeners to sham paranoia

  when what they really want

  is to pick out the swarthiest, scruffiest of us

  and pat us top to toe,

  my fellow Ahmeds and my alien Alis,

  Mohammed alias Mo—

  my buddies from med school, my doubles partners,

  my dark unshaven brothers

  whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends,

  ourselves the goateed other.

  ODE TO A DRONE

  Hell-raiser, razor-feathered

  riser, windhover over

  Peshawar,

  power’s

  joystick-blithe

  thousand-mile scythe,

  proxy executioner’s

  proxy ax

  pinged by a proxy server,

  winged victory,

  pilot cipher

  unburdened by aught

  but fuel and bombs,

  fool of God, savage

  idiot savant

  sucking your benumbed

  trigger-finger

  gamer’s thumb

  DYNASTY

  My father before me, the watchmaker of Herat, used his monocle and gear tweezers to pick a splinter from my ring finger.

  Egypt (not Qutb’s, Tut’s) believed this finger bore a vein that drained directly to the heart.

  My father’s father before him had irises a Bactrian hazel, dating back to the third century B.C.

  They are the eyes of an ancient rapist who traveled here with Alexander’s army; but they are the only keepsakes I have.

  His father before him was a mountain man, and came down to Herat only once, to trade a horse.

  Herat took his horse at knifepoint and gave him the cough that killed him and two of his brothers.

  His father before him shot two British soldiers with a carbine that liked to buck left.

  The regiment was all redcoated Highlanders, who brought their bagpipes to the Hindu Kush.

  His third shot sparked strange in the breech and peppered his face.

  His father before him, a decorator of Qur’ans, bandaged his only apprentice’s eyes.

  My ring finger is an inkwell full of royal blood, my language, fired tiles and tessellation.

  Today I stand outside an electrified fence and watch a gunship’s rotors spin down.

  My generations stand behind me in a row, and the draft sets us spinning in place:

  Sufi pinwheels, seizing any wind as an excuse for ecstasy.

  THE ILLUMINATOR

  My grandfather, the last illuminator of Qur’ans in Herat, went blind at fifty-two.

  All his life, his brush was forbidden cedar forests, clear-eyed falcons, horses, men—

  Any shape that might rival God’s first stick figure on the dust jacket of life,

  Any doodle with a root, hoof, hand, or frond.

  A diacritical dot, the rules went, must not masquerade as a watermelon seed.

  An alif must not be reborn as a leaf, nor a laam as a lamb, nor a baa as a sheep.

  My grandfather’s stained-glass cataracts left his eyes as blue-gray as an Englishman’s.

  Fingertips ink-black, wick-black where the light had long ago alit

  Saw by feel his grandson, his living image.

  Indigo infused his lenses, madder red his rosacea.

  Those lenses were solid haze, as if a dry nib leeched his inkdrop-pupils

  To conjure a border or crosshatch mountains outlaw.

  Cataracts are waterfalls: When my father closed his father’s eyes,

  Thousands of unpenned images, unpent at last,

  Thrashed upstream to the breeding waters of his dreams.

  THE INTERROGATION

  When they leathered his arm to the armrest and began

  like manicurists in a nail salon

  he says that he “retreated” from his hand

  until the part of him that dwelt there once was gone

  and heard no news from his own outer reaches.

  In his memoir of those years, he sketches

  the tricks he used, one of which was “vision.”

  Maybe it’s better we present his version:

  “I imagined my arm as a slope I had to scale,

  shaft of the humerus as smooth as shale

  but white like bone and giving way like sand

  wherever I set foot. I couldn’t stand,

  couldn’t take a breather, or I’d ride my own

  disintegration down and end up on

  the shore—which was my hand, my fingernails.

  I crested my shoulder, rested on its knoll.

  I looked down then and saw the pain as men

  charging uphill to where I hid my sense

  of pain. At once I stomped a foot to see

  the whole arm crack, calve, crash into the sea,

  disarticulated, part of me no more.

  I did this for the other arm and for

  my feet and testicles and eyes until

  I found myself on a Pacific atoll

  that had no latitude, no longitude.

  I built a hut, I scuttled the one canoe.

  I saw a sun that weighed a kiloton

  and the power cord by which it swung.”

  IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION

  We were that raghead family

  Catching rainfall in a still.

  The old famines had us spooked,

  Thirst myths passed on to us sons

  By our drunk, teary father,

  Smack of rock still on his tongue.

  Once he had to bite his tongue,

  He told us, so his family

  Could drink of him. His father

  Didn’t have to ask. But still,

  He said, you boys are good sons.

  Just do my will. And don’t speak.

  We didn’t. Nobody spoke

  To us, either, though our tongues

  Could parrot, palate the sounds.

  Yes. Yes, that was my family,

  Awed by leavened bread, turnstiles,

  Drinking fountains; my father,

  Screaming Respect your father

  In public; me, who did not speak.

  Come dawn we poured out the stills

  And prayed in a stranger’s tongue

  For the health of our family

  And the rising of the sun.

  Can I be my father’s son

  Without being my father?

  Or am I unfamiliar

  Because of the way I speak?

  This foreign, farangi tongue

  That borrowed some words and stole

  The rest, imperial style.

  I want to be a good son,

  But without biting my tongue.

  I’m thinking of my father.

  It feels like treason to speak

  Publicly of my family.

  But is it still a family

  When the son cannot speak

  The mother tongue of the father?

  TRAINING COURSE

  Day One. Monkey is strapped into chair.

  Trainee tonsures Monkey and affixes electrodes.

  Introductory lecture regarding alternating and direct current,

  Trainee and Monkey at desks, side by side.

  Day Two. Basics of cocktail preparation.

  Sodium thiopental to win minds, potassium chloride to win hearts.

  Pancuronium to cure all.

  Mint sprig optional.

  Day Three. Trainee straps Monkey into chair.

  Trainee shaves the rest of Monkey’s body and attaches electrodes,

  Then EKG leads.

  Lecture on induced current, one coil awakening the charge in another.

  Day Four. Trainee is to familiarize himself with pertinent knots:

  Falconer’s knot, grief knot, hunter’s bend.

  Killick hitch, axle hitch,
slipknot, monkey’s fist.

  Pity not. Noose.

  Day Five. Preliminary killings.

  Trainee will set out ant bait in at least five corners.

  Visit to lobster tank at local grocery store.

  Interactive online tutorial, “Do Primates Feel Pain?”

  Day Six. Trainee zips previously shaven Monkey into orange jumpsuit.

  With Monkey secure in chair, Trainee makes verbal offer of cigarette and Bible.

  Trainee attaches electrodes to Monkey, EKG leads to himself.

  Supplementary lecture on circuit breakers.

  Day Seven. Historical overview:

  Asps hooked onto the breasts of empresses,

  Peasants sagging down wooden pikes, pistols handed to Soviet generals.

  Crucifixion. The arithmetic of quartering.

  Day Eight. Self-assessment module.

  After leathering properly dressed Monkey into chair,

  Trainee places left hand on switch, right hand on heart,

  And waits for Monkey, preoccupied with naked tube light, to meet eyes.

  KILLSHOT

  On the terrace of the Presidential Palace you lie glued to the scope for less than an hour before you have to take the shot. Tourist or terrorist: It was always going to be your call.

  You are applauded for taking the shot and saving the nation, although you are not allowed to rise off your elbows, the knobs of which have begun to ache. A hand—the same hand that occasionally guides a straw into your mouth—reaches around to pin a medal on your lapel.

  You keep watch for another twenty-five years, your elbows flattening into steady stands, when the same terrorist, or maybe the terrorist’s son, arrives with a bouquet of flowers and drops it on the site of the original killing.

  You take the shot again and watch the paramedics carry off the body before the media can get there. They give your sniper scope another thumbs-up sign; you have done well, as a prompt second medal proves.

  You begin to realize that you are profiling the visitors to the Presidential Palace on the crudest criteria: skin tone, nose size, turban or no turban, beard or no beard, a certain innate glower to the eyes. Every twenty-five years, you take another shot at a nearly identical-looking man, never quite wiping out his recalcitrant line. It is as though his terrorist descendants are drawn to memorialize one ancient wrong on the birth of a male child every quarter of a century.