Arrival noted, 11:30 P.M.
delivery normal, baby
prepared for agency, mother
released in two days, baby
to foster care, then
to adoptive parents.
No memories, save one,
a fall, bathroom, head
bleeding, black and white
floor tile, radiator harder
than child’s skull.
Now 70, the same person,
a lying mirror each day,
a small cemetery, West
Virginia, a headstone
a mother finally,
a life of mourning.
A phone call, a lawyer’s clerk:
Can you tell me about Lisa Landesman?
I pause for that is a name I have
not heard in forty years, save
in a poem I once wrote,
now long forgotten.
She was my sister for two
or three weeks, adopted like I was,
and then Mike, my then father
dropped dead of a massive
heart attack and she was soon gone.
We were Federal adoptions, our
birthplace under Federal law, not
getting its own for two decades,
and her adoption wasn’t final so she
was re-placed and never replaced.
She won’t inherit as I will from
my cousin who died having no
siblings, spouse, children,
nieces or nephews, who left
no will, who left only kind memories.
In my next life I think
I want to come back
as a cat, and not just any
cat, but a domestic
shorthaired spotted tabby.
I have it on good authority
that there is nothing finer
in the animal world
than being a domestic
shorthaired spotted tabby.
There will be much work
involved in the early days,
right after adoption, for
people tend very much
to be slow learners.
But with enough time,
the occasional well placed
claw, and earned affection
you can bend them
finally to your will.
At least that is what
my cat tells me in
moments of abject honesty.
It is hard,
painfully hard
to realize
your guide
doesn’t know
where you
need to go.
And the one
who could guide
you isn’t
there, doesn’t
know you
at all, had
you when
she could
only place you
for adoption.
So you wander
guideless,
self-guided,
deeper into
the unknown.
Korean and Basque are orphan languages
although linguists prefer the term
language isolates, which sounds
almost chemical, as though some
reaction resulted in a linguistic
sediment, or distillate perhaps.
If that is the proper term I
suppose I was a human isolate,
which actually makes some sense,
even after adoption, for I would
learn years later from my
step brother that I was
isolated from the family, “just
like a brother, just like
one of us,” just not one
of them ever, just an isolate
and I now comfortable with that.
You came into my life last week, your name
forever locked away inside her mind.
My life, she felt, would never be the same
and therefore left all thought of you behind.
You loved her, I suppose, that summer night
then left her, bearing me, until she turned
me over for adoption, that she might
forget the love that you so quickly spurned.
A Jew, she said, but would say little more
a father, Portuguese, is all I know,
who cast his seed, then left and closed the door
and me, the son, he never would see grow.
You left her life long before I was born,
the father I won’t know but only mourn.
First published in Minison Project, Sonnet Collection Series, Vol. 2, Sept. 2021
It seems less than fair that as a child
I was Jewish to the core, adopted, yes,
but certainly fully Jewish and not merely
by maternal lineage which would suffice.
Christmas was alien to me then, even
when I left Judaism behind, a shadow
that would follow me closely into
my Buddhist practice and life.
But DNA made a liar of so many,
my birth mother, the adoption agency
and my adoptive parents, for I know
my Judaism was only half of me.
So now I can enjoy Christmas
and other holidays, listen anew
to “The Little Drummer Boy”
and relish the irony of my new life.
For I have aged, as has my wife,
and when they sing “Do you hear
what I hear?” she sadly says
“not any longer I don’t” and then,
“Do you see what I see?” and I
must admit I do so only barely
and the doctors assure me that
soon enough I may say no as well.
Without choice, I, evicted from the womb
Not cast aside, despite what I would see,
Too soon carried into an unknown room
and gladly taken up, offsetting gloom,
and soon another child, I becoming we.
Without choice, I evicted from the womb
was there to watch him fall into his tomb,
leaving her with grief weighing heavily.
Too soon carried into an unknown room
she took gladly, I left to assume
why my birth mother hadn’t wanted me,
without choice, I evicted from the womb
left to imagine her face, in my gloom
whispering in my dreams, “you had to be
too soon carried into an unknown room,
to insure you a life, that you might be
more than I could offer, be truly free.”
Without choice, I evicted from the womb
too soon carried into an unknown room.
First published in Grand Little Things, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 2020
grand-little-things.com/2020/07/21/two-poems-by-louis-faber/
A triptych hangs in the gallery of memory. Admission is by invitation only.
The first panel is a time fogged mirror into which I stare. The adopted image hides behind the tarnished silver. My adopted mother’s voice is heard from a hidden speaker: “You were named after my father.” I want to tape his picture to the glass, a face to share the empty space. She has no pictures, she says, he never liked being photographed, said it would steal his soul. She can barely remember him: “He died when I was five.” I ask questions. I need to know more about the giver of names. She falls silent, drawing in, secreting memory.
In the second panel a woman sits, fidgeting. She is a striking blond. I cannot see her as being sixty-one, though she is. I deny that I am fifty. As the Rabbis climb the few steps to the Bimah, she leans over. “You know,” Lois says, “just like you, I was named for your grandfather. She talks freely of herbalism, life in New York, places she wants someday to see. “It’s funny,” she whispers, “I’ve never seen a picture of him; like he had some kind of phobia of being photographed.” Outside the Temple she stands with my mother and sister, arms interlocked, embracing both. I snap the picture. I am not captured on the film. Lois and I drive back to my mother’s apartment, stopping at one of the unending lights on Wisconsin Avenue. She touches my hand: “You know there was one more person named after him, your other sister.” The light changes.
There is only a picture hook in the wall — not even the faint outline that marks the space from which a picture is removed, the wall beneath unbleached by the sun. Lisa, my my sister, like me adopted and as quickly withdrawn, left no outward marks. She is a footnote in my father’s obituary. She is cast off by family, an unmentionable. She is my mother’s deeply hidden scar.
I am repeatedly drawn into this room. It’s walls never change, the pictures periodically replaced. I need to visit, to assure myself of — what? Someday, too soon, this exhibit will close.
First appeared in Pitkin in Progress, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2002)
My adoptive parents died
six years apart, I received
two announcement texts
from the son they had together.
We negotiated her obituary,
and I am waiting for her funeral,
but after seven years, I have
given up hope of that happening.
I did visit my birth mother’s
grave, placed a small stone
on hers, watered the ground
with tears of sadness and joy
at having a mother at last,
and I have a picture
of my birth father’s headstone
so at last I can mourn my parents.
an old writer and his words 