Love Poem for A Wife,
1
- A.K. Ramanujan
Really
what keeps us apart
at
the end of years is unshared
childhood.
You cannot, for instance,
meet
my father. He is some years
dead.
Neither can I meet yours:
he
has lately lost his temper
and
mellowed.
In
the transverse midnight gossip
of
cousins’ reunions among
brandy
fumes, cashews and the Absences
of
grandparents, you suddenly grow
nostalgic
for my past and I
envy
you your village dog-ride
and
the mythology
of
the sever crazy aunts.
You
begin to recognize me
as
I pass from ghost to real
and
back again in the albums
of
family rumours, in brothers’
anecdotes
of how noisily
father
bathed,
Slapping
soap on his back;
find
sources for a familiar
sheep-mouth
look in a sepia wedding
picture
of father in a turban,
mother
standing on her bare
splayed
feet, silver rings
on
her second toes;
and
reduce the entire career
of
my recent unique self
to
the compulsion of some high
sentence
in His Smilesian diary.
And
your father, gone irrevocably
in
age, after changing every day
your
youth’s evenings,
he
will acknowledge the wickedness
of
no reminiscence: no, not
the
burning end of the cigarette
in
the balcony, pacing
to
and fro as you came to the gate
late,
after what you thought
was
an innocent
date
with a nice Muslim friend
who
only hinted at touches.
Only
two weeks ago, in Chicago,
you
and your brother James started
one
of you old drag-out fights
about
where the bathroom was
in
the backyard,
north
or south of the well
next
to the jackfruit tree
in
your father’s father’s house
in
Alleppey. Sister-in-law
and
I were blank cut-outs
fitted
to our respective
slots
in a room
really
nowhere as the two of you
got
down to the floor t draw
blueprints
of a house from memory
of
everything, from newspapers
to
the backs of envelopes
and
road-maps of the United States
that
happened
to
flap in the other room
in
a midnight wind: you wagered heirlooms
and
husband’s earnings on what the Uncle in Kuwait
would
say about the Bathroom
and
the Well, and the dying,
by
now dead,
tree
next to it. Probably
only
the Egyptians had it right:
their
kings had sisters for queens
to
continue the incests
of
childhood into marriage.
or
we should do as well-meaning
Hindus
did.
Betroth
us before birth
forestalling
separate horoscopes
and
mother’s first periods,
and
wed us in the oral cradle
and
carry marriage back into
the
namelessness of childhoods.
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