Poetry Magazine
Instructions to an Artisan
Into the rood wood, where the grain's current splits
around the stones of its knots, carve eyelashes and eyelids.
Dye the knots, too—indigo, ink-black, vermillion
irises. These will be his eyes, always open, willing
themselves not to close when dust rises or sweat falls,
eyes witnessing, dimly, the eclipse that shawls
the shuddering hill, Jerusalem's naked shoulder.
The body itself? From a wick that still whiffs of smolder,
wax, because wax sloughs a smooth skein on the fingers just
below sensation's threshold. Prop the cross
upright and let the tear-hot wax trickle, slow, clot, taper
into a torso, thighs, calves, feet. Of Gideon Bible paper,
thinner than skin, cut him his scrap of cloth; embed
iron shavings in his forehead,
and, as the wax cools, scrape the rust off an old fuel can
to salt the whole wound that is the man.
Cry, if you feel like crying, and if no one else is there.
Then set it on the counter with your other wares.
Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Biography
Amit Majmudar is the author of the poetry collections 0º 0º (2009) and Heaven and Earth (2011), which received the Donald Justice Prize. Majmudar's poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the New York Review of Books, and the Best American Poetry. His first novel, Partitions (2011), received wide acclaim, with featured reviews in the Wall Street Journal and on the National Public Radio program . . .
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Religion, Arts & Sciences
POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern
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