Amit Majmudar, ‘Nocturne’
“A healthy man can expect to get hard three to five times per night….Doctors call these erections while you sleep “nocturnal penile tumescence.” — Men’s Health
Why do they happen at all, much less
five times a futile night—
nested, within the circadian, their
sprung rhythm of delight?
Unless delight misreads the message.
Unless they choke and strain
against their loneliness like starved
Rottweilers on a chain.
Who visits in the witching hour
as REM begins
and slides her darkling mouth around
his hardening and grins?
Lascivious sylph or cocktease yakshi
or ex from some past life,
coaxing a husband into sin
at arm’s length from his wife.
Or else someone that when awake
he would not dare to daydream,
verboten body, evanescent
pelvis figure-eighting,
or maybe all his fantasies
since age twelve coalesce,
voluptuous ghosts that flash him their
aurora borealis.
A hundred mayflies in his blood
take wing at once above
the hushed and shingled houses, seeking
the ones they shied to love,
desperately swooping down and left,
back up, around, and right,
a minute to mate, then drift and fade
on a humid summer’s night.
*****
Editor’s note: I see this poem, which was first published in Only Poems, as existing where one’s various worlds overlap: the body, the mind, work (Amit Majmudar is a medical doctor), family… Amit Majmudar wisely provides no comment on his poem.
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of twenty books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.
His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now.
One of Majmudar’s forthcoming volumes is a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, entitled Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026.
For links to Majmudar’s Nonfiction, Fiction, Mythology and Translations, please see his website.
Photo: “I Dream Of Love” by toddwshaffer is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
