27 Marjan Street

The rooms shrink down with each new coat of paint.
The house stays calm. The child inside the house
is also calm, face tucked into mother’s blouse,
but the rooms shrink down with each new coat of paint.

Though the house is gone, the walls will not relent.
No more a child, at every new impasse,
you shrink the rooms with coat on coat of paint
to a house inside that child inside that house.

chimes for jim

in all that pain an element of play
-James Merrill, Chimes for Yahya

“Lit by far-off daylight, Isfahan,"
spirited like shahtush through the ring
of your delicious “Chimes,” lights on my tongue
thirst for that old “peculiar” taste: ghalyán
smoke bittersweet like sugared tea. Unspun
discarded “cardings” (another sheepish pun
brushed under) fade to unveil that sunlit town
where my childhood river used to run.

Where’s my childhood river? Used up and run
dry, its water dammed and rationed now.
Back then, JM, you would have seen it flow
with pattern rich as the yarns Yahya
spun over your eyes, trompe-l’eau of mirrored swan
catamarans twice doubled and made one.

Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Narrative, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His work has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.