So, I finally wrote a poem…

I haven’t written a poem in a year and a half. It turned out that this one’s about the adoption (surprise, surprise). In fact, it’s the one I promised to write on the travel blog, in Guangzhou, about the wind. It isn’t sentimental, so if you’re expecting the warm and fuzzies in verse, look elsewhere. It also isn’t that great a piece, but I’m just content to get my poet legs back under me some time in this century. So I’m sharing it…

It resonates with what a lot of my kind of blogger aparents have said, like here for starters, about the challenge of falling in love with your child. That it isn’t automatic. That it’s hard work, even if you’ve been waiting for her for nigh-on 13 years of your adult life. It’s humbling. It isn’t like being an aunt, and it isn’t rainbows and ladybugs and cloudbursts. Not for a long time.

It is an eventual interweaving. An exercise in faith, which is to say, an exercise in something you can’t see, can’t prove exists. I now have some understanding of why repetition plays such a role in the way we humans learn, remember, play, talk, worship, and find pleasure (yes, that sort of pleasure). Repetition may in fact be key to love. That’s humbling to admit on some level–that it isn’t crashing cymbals and a trombone flourish or even the soft glow of a sunrise. It’s an act of coming back.

My Daughter and I Speak of the Wind

She collects the stars through her window,
pointing to them and the moon, white sparks
that register on the bare margins of her life.
Free for the taking. She signs moon to me,
a kissed sickle of fingers rising in air.
One day I appeared on a low bench in China,
mustard upholstery holding us up, and announced
my new status—I’m your Mommy—and her
(new) name. She furrowed her brow. I wasn’t
regular. Amid pulls of congee and sour plums
and the orphanage shoes two sizes too big,
I blew in like a storm.

What were you expecting me to say? Like a gentle
breeze? Like a dream?

In the tropical province where we go to make her
legal, the wind kicks up each night at dusk.
It peels off the river, a whirling husk of heat
and leaves and road. She feels it hit
and looks up at me for the word. I don’t have it,
so I run my fingers through her hair, calling
whoosh. I am making this up as I go, of course.
The language we share is piecemeal, ad hoc.
And yet we come back to it each day
as quilters return to the circle, out of something
more than boredom, less than yearning. We come
because we cannot undo what’s been done
to our hearts. We come and wind
the thread over and over around our fingers
in a knot that keeps it all from unraveling.