Sonnet Crown: Amit Majmudar, ‘Recourse’

1.

Time, like love, is cyclic. Please come back
to me. I’ll stand here waiting, wanting while
the mare without her rider rounds the track.
I want to weave a crown for you, design
a daisy chain whose threaded stems become
a bracelet that handcuffs your wrist to mine.
My shadow’s gnomon tilts like a sun dial’s.
I know you’re somewhere close. I feel a thrum,
a thrill beneath the stillness of the earth,
the way a woman, days before the birth,
places her husband’s hand on the sea swell
that rises out of her and passes through her,
and, touching so much vastness, he can tell
for all their time as one, he never knew her.

2.

For all our time as one, I never knew you—
but doesn’t learning come from repetition?
I’ll do this better if I do it over.
I’ll know your every need by heart, pursue you
like truth. I’ll learn to be a truthful lover.
I’ll circle back to freshman year and woo you.
No song’s recorded in a single session.
No sinner’s shriven after one confession.
It’s time that grows the pearl. Nacre layers
the sand grain, like a secret in the mouth.
Repentance grows, too—grows by daily prayers
into a faith whose trigger seed was doubt.
I am a pearl diver in your depth.
I never left. I just came up for breath.

3.

I never left, I just came up for breath,
but now I am ready to follow you all the way down.
I’ve read we get euphoric as we drown.
Samsara swirls us under. When we break
the whitecaps for an instant, that is death.
Don’t make us wait to be reborn before
we love again. You know me—I’ll just make
the same mistakes. Or make things even worse.
So what if time’s a circle? Doesn’t mean
we have enough of it. The now we’re in
will never come again. So come again
into my life, and love me sight unseen.
We’re both at sea, and no good at dead reckoning.
A burning town’s the only lighthouse beckoning

4.

Our house of light is burning down. It beckons in
the gloaming. The road I’m roaming is a ring.
All time is circular. We’re only seconds in.
All reasoning is circular. I sing
the seasons all the way around the year.
There was a chemist once whose dream disclosed
benzene’s atomic structure. What appeared
before him was a serpent swallowing
its tail—aroma’s O, ouroboros.
I’m wise at last to what the image knows.
I see my answer now, my big mistake.
A ring! Why couldn’t it have been this clear
back then? I see it best when I’m awake.
I’ve circled back. But there is no one here.

5.

I’ve circled back, but there is no one where
the ring road ends. It ends in newfound ruins,
a shell-flecked nest, a rain-worn blade that bears
a message for us. Who can read the runes?
Nietzsche proclaimed the eternal return
and threw his arms around a bleeding horse
to feel the centuries reversing course.
His gooseflesh rose like spores that pock a fern.
Let vultures circle, only widdershins
above the ring road where I wait alone,
knifing in bark a promise of my own.
I know the ring road ends where it begins.
Time is a circle I can put to use:
a wheel to roll things back, a crown, a noose.

6.

A wheel to roll things back, a crown, a noose:
My own Venn diagram of rings to choose
from. Fill its center up with hourglass sand,
and that’s where Archimedes, kneeling, draws.
This is the Roman siege of Syracuse;
he’s hard at work on time, its shape and laws.
He looks up from a boot. A soldier stands
above him, dripping gladius in hand.
Do not disturb my circles, says the Greek.
The soldier studies them, then runs him through—
and so reveals what Archimedes seeks,
the circle, like a circuit, broken, weeks
and months and centuries and aeons spilling
in slow, concentric circles from the killing.

7.

In slow, concentric circles from the still-pink
narcotic kiss print of the cupping glass,
let your memories ripple outward, killing
the pain I’ve caused you. We are not our past,
though time is cyclic. Cycles can be broken,
souls reborn in this life, sleepers woken.
Not that I can sleep beneath this star.
Horizon, magic circle, boxing ring—
time is the space, the spell, the place we spar,
the dome in which your name is echoing.
It’s where I pray the theory into fact
that love, like time, is cyclic. Please come back.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “The sonnet crown is a naturally recursive form of forms. The beginning of each sonnet is also an ending, and vice versa. A candle tilts to light a candle that tilts to light a candle, until the occult circle of flame is complete, and the poet sits inside it, meditating the next line, which may well be the line just written.

“This sonnet crown took, as its subject, the tendency of lovers, or at least their memories, to relapse. “Relapse” means to fall back, etymologically. To fall back in love; to fall back out of love. The sonnets enact through form and content alike the recrudescence of the past. The last line of the overall crown matches the first line of the overall crown. The reappearance of the old pain makes it a crown of thorns.

“I wrote this sonnet crown first line to last. I had never even attempted one before, but I relinquished myself to the music-making. I could do that because I circled around a theme–recursion in love–rather than trying to tell a story or present a philosophical argument or any such prosaic thing. Just pure pursuit of the right sounds. This crown came at the end of a sonnet-writing tear so my hand was in practice, as it were.

“Close readers will notice that the crown is imperfect, however. In the final, truncated sonnet, the speaker makes haste to return to the beginning, to break the process of endless recursion. Accordingly, the rhyme word of the line where the deviation begins is “broken”–and it’s there that the formal pattern–the “cycle”–itself is broken. Broken/woken collapses the separated rhyme sounds into a couplet, with a second couplet to conclude the 12-line ending–a couplet of couplets, the original pair formation and the hoped-for repeat pair formation, embodied in the music of the ending that is, at last, a new beginning. “

*****

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). “Recourse” was first published in Plume Poetry, and will be appearing in Majmudar’s forthcoming collection, Things My Grandmother Said, in early 2026. 
More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Photo: “0103-IVAM – Please Come Back 05” by gibbix1 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.