Dilip Chitre was born in 1938 in Baroda, Gujarat, India. He is a poet, translator, painter, filmmaker and editor. His collected Marathi poems published in three volumes--- Ekoon Kavita--I, II, and III— contain all of his published and unpublished poems since 1954. He has a collection of short stories, a collection of four novellas, four collections of essays, one volume of critical writings, and two plays among his Marathi opus. He has published an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry in translation. His other books of translations include: Says Tuka (Penguin), Anubhavamrut (Sahitya Akademi), and Virus Alert. His English poetry books and chapbooks are: Travelling in a Cage, Ambulance Ride, The Mountain, and No Moon Monday at the River Karha.. His English poems are included in every major anthology of Indian poetry, including, most recently, Post Climactic Love Poem (Aark Arts). He has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Ekoon Kavita-I and the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize for Says Tuka. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa and a writer-in-residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich. His feature film, Godam, won the Jury's Special Prize at the Festival des Trois Continents, Nantes, France. He is the editor of New Quest , A Quarterly Journal of Participative Inquiry. Chitre lives with his wife Viju in Pune, Maharashtra.
Post Climactic Love Poem
Published by AARK ARTS
Copyright © 2005 by Dilip Chitre
Acknowledgements: Contemporary World Poetry Series Editor: Sudeep Sen
POST CLIMACTIC LOVE POEM
1.
Alternatively, I may start running
If it's not too late already, down the slope
My eyes cataleptic, my motion blurred
Blinded by the wind and bitten in the face
With frost-burnt nostrils and cracked lips
I may go vaguely towards the end
Of this wayward narrative.
Or else, freeze where I am
Surrounded by legends of snow
In the grand myth of ice
Memories of prairie winters
That so definitely replaced all autumns
Leaving black exclamations and trees
Bared, denuded, stripped of their all.
It happened in my life's first true fall
At age 37, when I became
The authentic alien, the foreign fiend
Among floundering affairs, Chinese dolls,
Lascivious Romanians, libidinous Latinos,
Steamy blacks, and frigid blondes.
The grass belonged to the university of sorrows
Waiting for the semester of fatal snow
In the town where poets got lost.
2.
Watercolour events drying on the surface of paper
That I purchased in Europe with aquarelle pencils
I still remember the store in Munich
It was in Schwabing, off Ludwigstrasse,
On a soft Bavarian autumn afternoon,
Just hours before I took the train to Heidelberg.
Back in Gunther's house in Dossenheim,
Immanuel Kantstrasse-5, where he died later,
I was alone in Deutschland, a strange Hindu.
I needed distance from a designated life
But in disciplined Germany I only found
Organized emptiness, Faust's hound.
By the time I went to Berlin, it was already winter.
The parks were deserted, the lakes frozen,
I rode the S-Bahn dreading the arrival
Of skinheads and fascists, racists on rampage,
At the Brandenburg Gate I found
A metaphor worth smuggling into India.
3.
Ambiguous, huge, and heavily atmospheric
The Hauptbahnhofs with their grey concourses
This is what civilization is about.
Civilization is about the Kaufhaus and the Biergarten,
And the football scores connected with adrenaline.
But Gunther dreamt about the Dhangar with his flocks
Fading towards Konkan in the rain
Over the Sahyadri's range
And his newborn lambs.
I go now where he came from:
Towards Teutonic structures, Gothic cathedrals, baroque Flourishes, and metaphysical constructs.
Is this Western civilization?
According to Mahatma Gandhi,
“It would be a good idea! ”
4.
Hidden in my skull are the caves where the endless
Reticular frescoes of my awesome childhood
Unroll.
Those are the spaces where the banyan trees of Vadodara
Vie with the neems and the mango groves.
They were born ancient like me—those banyans
With their branch-like roots splayed in empty spaces,
With their huge population of ants and worms,
Bats hanging upside down.
And the public libraries where books printed
On what were once forests in Sweden
Gave me the world's unfathomable texts.
Baroda is what the British called Vadodara.
That's where my deaf and blind great-grandmother died
At the age of 101—bald, wrinkled, and withered.
That's where we flew kites and learnt to finger
The pussies of eager and willing little girls
On summer afternoons and always upstairs.
That's where we secretly read manuals of black magic
And pornographic books in euphemistic Hindustani
In which it was invariably the dhobi's wife that got laid
After washing the whole town's dirty linen on the ghat.
Could I tell those stories now?
After sixty years of fermenting in my own vat?
Vadodara's vats are full of such sexy scent!
5.
This is no poetry; they're sure to say,
The ranting and ravings of a near-senile man,
And like my father approaching his death,
I disintegrate among ungrateful children
And neighbours who'd hardly care.
I watched him die in a series of time-lapse photographs.
We were already distanced in space and time
Much before he died. Perhaps this is what generation means:
The absolute distance between the trunk and the leaves.
But Baburao, my father, was a gentleman of sorts,
Where I would be rude, he was mildly sarcastic.
But in the end he turned into an embittered fanatic.
He was writing his memoirs when he died.
That was the only medication that could keep him alive,
Bring his anger; release his resentment through drying up glands.
Now I am getting truly afraid of my own memories
And the internal openings they bleed out of.
I know when you remember you begin to age
More or less rapidly, clawing at the bars of your cage.
6.
Did I play with Satan's tool the game of love?
And poetry, making the one
Dangerous connection, with the zenith or the zero,
To find your trove?
You held the Earth, the substances, the soil
And I the mere map, the delusion
Of landscape and topography, place and time,
The co-ordinates of human toil.
You turned the stars, rotated the seasons,
Kissed the girls and made them cry.
Made me a puppet on a string,
Gave me the reasons.
It didn't strike me that this was a game
Of roulette, a random guess
Against all probability, a wager
On your inscrutable-seeming smile.
Now we are face to face, the zenith and the zero,
I am the winning hand and you the Hero.
7.
Dangerously and in a frenzy of passion she sailed
Into my arms, tempestuously kissing, hungry with love,
Tossed up in a tide and forced to the bottom,
Woman of the fathomless sea.
It was just she and I
At the bottom of me.
Just she and I
And the chance to be.
I now have a stone head
Sculpted by circumstance.
And in the hollows of my eyes
A residual glow.
I am an armless torso
In the embrace of her memory. |
