After two centuries of critical neglect and disparagement, Persian poetry of the early modern period has enjoyed increasing scholarly attention and appreciation over the last few decades. This revival has focused largely on the work of poets who emigrated from Iran to India and has left intact the historiographical truism that Safavid Iran was a doctrinaire literary wasteland. But even at the height of the great Indian migration between 1580 and 1625, not all the poets went to India. Biographical writing and the poetic archive alike attest that the Safavid realm was home to a dynamic literary culture, embracing many diverse conceptions of the nature and purpose of poetry. At the avant-garde end of this poetic spectrum lies the work of Zolāli Khvānsāri (d. ca. 1615). His work is marked by complex concatenations of image and metaphor, frequent word-play and neologism, and tightly compressed syntax, challenging the limits of both language and logic. Driven by the power of the imaginative faculty, his poetry reconfigures sensory perceptions and conventional topoi in an artistic enterprise that would come to be known as khayāl-bandi, “binding the imagination.” To show in detail how this poetics of the imagination shapes language, rhetoric, and narrative, this paper turns to a short passage from Zolāli’s longest narrative poem, Mahmud o Ayāz. At this point in the story, Mahmud has been abandoned by his beloved Ayāz, and for ten nights he fantasizes on one facet of Ayāz’s physiognomy, from his tresses and beauty mark to his neck and body. In Mahmud’s nocturnal khayāl-bāzi, “imagination games,” a single object becomes a vortex pulling in images from an expanse of semantic and experiential domains. Introducing this section and each of the ten episodes, the narrator presents the night of solitary vigil as the ideal setting for the play of imagination and weaves together the imaginative work of author and character. A variety of analytical tools, from traditional rhetorical devices to modern theories of metaphor, will help to show how a single image can serve to center the play of imagination even as it expands chaotically outward trough association and blending. This paper hopes to provide an entry point for understanding the artistic project of this challenging and little-read poet, whose impact would be felt in Persophone literature into the nineteenth century.