My wife and I adopted a year old baby girl in Cuenca, Ecuador in 2000. We were very fortunate to receive a referral right after we qualified and went to Ecuador less than 6 months after starting the process. Both of us have worked in other nations, so traveling to South America was not a source of anxiety. Nevertheless, we arrived in Ecuador three days after a military coup had taken place (we knew this, but chose to travel anyway), and that event made the in-country process much longer and more complex than we had been led to expect.
Our daughter, Sofia, had spent her entire life in a lovely, small nursery on a hill outside Cuenca. She was very well adjusted and had no problems with our arrival and we took "possession" of her right away. Much of the rest of the story is anecdotal and humorous now (it certainly wasn't then), including driving across the Andes in a battered old van on single lane dirt roads, etc. But after 21 days, and more than a few "donations" to various bureaucrats, we arrived in the U.S. at 1:20 PM on February 14. We completed the U.S. adoption exactly a year later, and we celebrate this day as "happy adoption day" every year.
HOW HAS THE ADOPTION EXPERIENCE AFFECTED YOUR POETRY?
Because I tend to write long, serial works and not many discrete poems, I can only think about this question in a macro or gestalt form. Sofia is a remarkable person and has taught me much. All of this experience, from the struggle in Ecuador to this morning's phone call with her teacher affects my poetry and I'm hard-pressed to draw any better delineating lines.
PLEASE SHARE A SAMPLE POEM(S) ADDRESSING (IN PART) ADOPTION:
This is a poem about Ecuador which I wrote subsequent to the adoption. It's part of a series of "geographies" that appeared in my book True News (Instance Press, 2002), but it's the closest I can come to an individual poem that is in dialogue with the adoption experience.
Ecuador
Cloud broke, wave froze
tooth and blade
whetted on the bone of
the back of the world.
Stars between islands
corners and steps—
this is the
closed country.
Then we crossed a cold equator and fell through a vertical horizon, that sentence behind the sentence, breathless.
Nowhere else
above.
Awake all night in
wet cement and choked barks
arrested between sighs
for promises to harden.
Then sour milk and
cash exchange –
knives, cloaks,
anonymous witnesses.
We had heard how, when surrounded and outnumbered, conquistadors invited their enemies to dinner then beheaded them with salutes.
Wait in the sky and
see what fate can do.
Is family learned
or instinct—
to sleep on any pillow as
the sum of endless distances.
Knowing how rain can split a mountain and
how a mountain can fill a sky and
how a sky is neither pavilion nor abyss and
how an abyss fills mouth and throat, all gravity.
Between the mud factory and a path paved with last intentions we changed languages, then whispered into the deafening drone, foreigners again.
That which we inhabit
inhabits us.
To keep a secret
one story must be true and
another false or at least
as invisible as the obvious.
These children float
drop-by-drop, ghost-to-glass
not rain but always
the color of rain.
After the king was allowed to fill a temple with his own ransom he was offered a choice of implements, sashes and cords, for his garrote.
To live here means one
way to go or the other.
Tongue slipped in toe hold
to climb among
words through
crevice and plunge.
Learn to say “please”
“thank you” and
“the way your mountains
prove the earth is flat.”
These are the illiterate pictures of beauty without desire, longing without a mask, allegory without every new name alight.
If body could only be
made of more earth.
A squared arch to
a trapezoidal door to
a circular tomb where
even breath cannot slip between stones.
The memory of a giant condor
rorschached the sun
but we went on burning
the rope bridge at both ends.
In the fortress of no resistance, gravity denied the distinctions and we learned to inhabit a wedge; admission will be free but there is no refuge.
This wind is
a moving hole.
A boy with a gun
hummed an imported
tune intended to
keep the deadly peace.
There was no end
to the thirst or
the sweet salt
that drank it.
So we galloped hard through a desert thatched by root and vine, gold-fields and landing zones, cemeteries and monkey markets, toward a city at war with itself.
Always the same gesture to
take the world and give it back.
Every day the cloud factory
draws a new map
and asks “is this
all there is?”
Then what to leave
behind: our furniture,
our food, our voyage
without wake.
It is simply the world that always wants more of itself so that we may someday resume the point of no return and count our blessings where we left them.
Those who can not go home
already are home.
ABOUT THE POET:
Craig Watson is the author of Sleepwalking With Orpheus (Shearsman, 2011), Secret Histories (Burning Deck, 2007), True News (Instance Press, 2002) and nine other books. He has worked in the performing arts, corporate arts, literary arts and emergency services, among other oddly grouped activities. He lives on an island with his wife and daughter. spending an ever-decreasing amount of time on the “main” land.
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1 comment:
Nice piece this! Impressive write!
Penchantpoet
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