Reasons for Adoption
- Reasons for Adoption
Manifesto
Because you reach the point of there being so much of the present joy it spills over into the past, until the past tinges with the ill-dreamt never was.
Because one has won you for you. Because you come to understand, having your life completely around you and in you, that who you are now is simply who you have always been, that the then was never your name, that recognition was just standing in another room across water, that water put into water becomes water, that your name now is the name you have always been and always lived in in love.
Because your hands have been taken by your father’s hands in adoption and you cannot now see your hands, the shape of them in his gentle imprint, as appearing as any other. When you touch your face, it is your father’s hands touching you. Because gesture
is the true parent. Because gesture and expression are the one soul. Because adoption permeates atoms, and the atoms of relationship are a level further. Because the fourth dimension is the continuous, and the present continuous overlaps
the past continuous. Because you are cleansed by adoption, and the earlier continuous was only the vehicle to carry you to this more immediate present in which your father lives in you continuously.
Because beginning is constant, and your eyes are writing this as you travel left to right, then to now, now to now. Because semen is not origin, but passage. Because your father is suffused in the creation of you, the approach. Because, infused with celibacy, your eyes are turning to his eyes, your eyes widen with his gaze.
Because divorce is a positive page and blood is minimal. Blood is nothing. Because, in reading, there is always an erasure. Because the heart is the essence, not the walls of the heart. Because the heart is uncontainable. [End Page 32]
Because as you read your adoptive father, you are creating the text of him, he is creating his text of you, you are creating the verse of you and him entwined, chromosomal, written, read, edited. Because your face and your hands are his face and his hands. Because your body grows into his body.
Because adoption is autobiography in time, and there is nothing that is false. Because, real and only, this is. [End Page 33]
Nicholas Samaras is the author of Hands of the Saddlemaker (1992) and American Psalm, World Psalm (2014). The poetry editor for the Adirondack Review, he is currently completing a new manuscript of poetry and a memoir.
