Three Metamorphoses
An Excerpt from Amit Majmudar's New Book
The following selection is excerpted from Amit Majmudar’s Three Metamorphoses: Novellas in Verse and Prose. NVR is grateful to Orison Books for permission to reproduce it here.
Though the prior authority of myth give way to the priority of math, why mourn, when I can sing this? The Gods who died in Sanskrit I will make immortal English. More bedtime stories? Damn it, Amit, all that superstition’s superceded. Another Book of dreck? Which of your thirty- three thousand gods has time to read it? It’s colorful and all, I grant you, but you’re a radiologist. What’s with this love of holy fibs and outmoded fables? Why jilt the Facts and elope with myth? I like my dark where I can see it. The future belongs to the past. It’s only through a lens of lead that we can see the blast, everywhere blaze and blossom, a constant nuclear spring whose green and heat seed and ignite the atoms rupturing; and I can see them, I can feel these tickles sum to a sting, a detonation and atonement at the heart of things. Perception is warm fusion, triggered by bosons, iambs, suns. Twenty-one grams, the weight of a soul, I gauge in kilotons. His straw hat tilted forward, walking-stick across his knee, a bearded old Victorian, in his last year, put to sea. Laudanum-lulled, glassing Galapagos at last, the ache in his temples eased a bit, and he could feel himself awaken. He floated off the Beagle’s deck—the Beagle as it had been, decades ago; he saw the candle shiver in his cabin. There on the shore he found it, either wrecked or beached, an Ark of gopherwood, whose hull the centuries had bleached. A dozen-dreadnought escort would have swum like krill before leviathan; the Beagle could have sailed her bilge. He made a motion, signing Charles Darwin in the dark and all at once the architecture of Noah’s Ark turned to powder, whished away, a rumor, never there. Into the husk of the hull rushed light and air. Darwin gave his straw hat to a pregnant nesting sparrow; he let the termites taste his walking-stick. This sustenance given, he turned back to the Beagle, his gaze declining heaven. He waved. The faithful Beagle, which was waiting for this signal, weighed anchor and swung to starboard, headed home to Bristol. Later, when crew and captain glanced behind them, they were stunned to see Galapagos engulfed by half a saffron sun. On that same Pacific, sixty years later, near Midway: Four Devastators, downed by the Akagi’s antiaircraft guns. The airmen— Chicago dockyard boys, an insurance salesman from Buffalo, two aw-helling Texans who’d never seen the sea before they went to war on it, Iowans, Ohioans, a Polish upholsterer’s son from Poughkeepsie— the whole busy motley is treading water. The Pacific pops around them, boiling, and one by one, the strafed airmen flip like ducks feeding in a pond back home. Bullets crisscross the water, wakes of turbulence coning out behind them as they slow. The ocean is empty since the Americans are diving faster than any Zero, their burns sealed with scales, their gashes, gills as they swim back home to the Yorktown. There, from the flight deck, their buddies point at steel-bright tailfins flashing in the sun, shouting, There’s Wainwright— look, Hobson’s made it back—and there’s McVickers right behind him—the old squadron in formation, a school of flying fish.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and Things my Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026).
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