Love Poem for a Wife,1 by 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 seven 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 irrevocable
in age, after changing everyday
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 brother James started
one of your 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 Aleppey. 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 to draw
blueprints of a house from memory
on 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 mothers' first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage back into
the namelessness of childhoods. Art by Abbie Rabinowitz
Recommended listening: Between Two Worlds - John Zorn All Night - Chance The Rapper (Kaytranada Extended Joint)
Links of the Day: The Beatles’ LEGO Yellow Submarine vs. the Sea Monster + Lego Island Walkthrough (I'd do anything to play this again) Illustrations of the People Who Want You to Work For Free Why I never have plans on Saturday night The Pound + Chill Wildlife (For the love of animals!)