Love Songs for Amogh

Love Songs for Amogh

Sachin Ketkar

I

Torment of thirty five worlds

Falls away

With your smile

A resplendent star

In the evening

Of my hazel eyes

You have fathered me, Amogh

Before I die

II

I haven’t come across yet

Love poems from fathers to their sons

Probably

It is not manly enough

To write a one

But here I am

Looking at the blank paper

In front of me

Remembering

The paper white purity

Of your skin

When the nurse placed you

In my hands for the first time

Your first dark faeces

When I changed your diapers the first time

Injecting cow’s milk

From a needless syringe

Into your mouth

I remember your ceaseless howling

On the second night

When your mother had not started lactating

Do father lactate?

They may

For they are females too

This poem for instance

Oozes out of the nib

Instead of my nipple.

III

I absolutely had no idea

My elf

That all along

You were hiding

In some obscure corner of my mind

Playing your usual peek a boo

Though I could feel

That you probably reached out

With your palm

When I tried to hear

Your somersaults

And flying kicks

Inside your mom

I remember

How you wetted

My umpteenth pajama

When I used to rock you on my laps

Sitting cross legged

(Yes, you could fit into the frame then)

During midnight hours

I also remember trying to put you asleep

On my shoulders

When you were bent on staying awake

With your mischief

Yes, fathering a father

Can be a tough job

But you did it pretty well.

IV

I don’t know exactly why

We decided to name you `Amogh’

Your name means the infallible one

An unfailing weapon

But I know now

That I aimed my arrow

At my aging agony

It hasn’t really missed its mark.

V

I have hardly anything on me

To pass on to you

With joy

The books I read

Are as dark as the ones I write

My genetic records

Are not commendable either

They haven’t isolated

The Asthma gene yet

Probably

It has latched itself on to you

Neither do I think that they can ever identify

The gene for poetry

Which is probably as bad

Or even worse

For it means

To be condemned forever

To live alone

Like a man with an extra pair

Of testicles

Hiding his shame

In the shadows of the world

VI

In these hands

I have held the ovaries

Of my aged mother

Floating in a flask

Where seeds of suffering were first sown

I have seen my wife

Writhing and bleeding in her labors

I have seen eyeballs

Of my friends father

Who was quite fond of me

Extracted and bottled

For posterity

I have been overrun

By asthma

In the Oxford Botanical Gardens

Where I thoughtlessly went

And spent rest of the evening

Floating in warm water of the bath tub

As if in amniotic fluid

Thousands of kilometers away from home

I have sat up wheezing

Any number of nights

From past two and half decades

Clutching the stubborn old darkness

Under my belly

For support

I have seen family friends

Swindle my father of his hard earned money

I have cremated dozens of old skulls

And heard them crack in their pyres

I have seen madness of love

In the woman’s eyes

I know the feeling of oneness

When I make love to her

But it is so different

From the feeling of love I have

When you sleep in my arms

Dreaming of innocence

I kiss your small white shoulders

Feel the fragrance of your fingers

Playing with my ear lobes

Agreed

I haven’t seen much of life

But I haven’t been entirely ignorant of death

But to catch a glimpse of love

And to be touched

By the beauty of the whole world

Is sufficient

To make a prematurely graying man

Without youth or childhood

Smile

VII

Amogh, for you

I have attempted the impossible

-writing a poem on happiness

But who cares if I fail

As long as your paradisal beauty

Lights up

The fading lamps of my eyes

24 Oct 2007

11 15 pm

Parvati as a Maker, Baby Aeroplanes and this Mad Water

I end up in Amogh's world so frequently- the world of Harry Potter films, dinosaurs, Hanuman and more recently Ganapati-that they invariably end up being part of my poetry.What is poetry after all but quest for the child within yourself, the naughty boy ( or girl) who is undomesticated, wild,  incredibly curious and so essentially anti-social and anti-civilizational. 

That's the reason why the poetry of the Romantic age was preoccupied the world of children. I remember Amogh has also given me the first line for my next poem- हे पाणी वेडंच आहे की नाही?! which means Isnt this water mad? Well, water is always mad Amogh. I also remember the grandson of my PhD supervisor telling me after drawing a big aeroplane on the board followed by a very small aeroplane that the smaller plane is the bigger one's baby. Only a small child can think of a baby aeroplane. A child's imagination, her way of looking at the world is what people call surreal. Anyway.

Parvati, coy of finding her nosy husband peeping into her bathroom while she is taking her bath, thinks of a plan to keep the nosy parker off. She takes the dirty soot from her body ( yucks! but remember she is the daughter of mountains!) and makes a door keeper ( not to be confused with Kafka's door keeper in the Trial, but equally firm and nasty) boy out of it. ( Well goddesses have their own ways, fine women as Yeats told us, eat crazy salad with their meat) and the boy resists Shiva ( that ascetic-lover) his legal father from going into his own house. The legal father gets angry with this defiant kid and in a fit of wrath cuts off his head with his trident. 

Dr.Sudhir Kakar would see Oedipal conflict here,he would also see the filth from Parvati's body as suggesting anal phase of psychosexual development, but the father has to repent. His missus is Durga and Chandika and Kali and etc, so the poor chap has to find a replacement for his soot-son's head. He kills an elephant asura (whats that?) and fits the elephant head on the decapitated doorkeeper. This is how the God of Intelligence, the bigamous beloved deity of Maharashtra comes into existence. Well thats what Amogh's recent CD on Ganapati says.

What fascinated me was the idea of taking soot and dirt from your body and making a living human being out of it. Well is this not a metaphor for creative process? You use the dirt from your body and make something living and intelligent out of it. So it will find place in my future poems!