Valentine for Geoff

God is everything including Santa Claus you told me
and I believed you, pure joy
for the morning oatmeal, oh thrill
for the weekly meeting.
                               My soul
my second part, my daily buddy.
With you, the quotidian’s as joyous
         as that moment when
sans expectation you placed a crinkly
         pile of presents in my lap and
gifted me, gifted me, gifted me
          beyond
my wildest dreams and into the
realms of magic

Frances Donovan
February 14, 2008

Valentines for the Shoebox
For the people I slept with, for the people I never slept with

Let’s go back to the third grade,
crowd our creaky bodies in the tiny desks
and write each other love poems

Let’s have hearts and flowers and Winnie the Pooh
let’s have the Tao and the Jesuits too
here’s one for me and one for you

And everybody gets one, everybody
Even the kid who was weird and
smelled funny and

picked at her scabs till they bled
and kept picking and
cried in the hallway one day for no reason at all

or none that you could see anyway,
with your lawns and your houses and your
cookies after school, cut from the package

by a mother who suffered for you
in ways you’ll never comprehend,
because your own life looks so different,

circumscribed by sidewalks and cement
and contraception, or no need for contraception,
you chic lesbians-—oh let’s go back

to the third grade and stuff our
shoeboxes with Valentines
and glue the paper doilies to the cut-out hearts

and tell the story of the saint
who sent his love through prison walls
and his love was not the love of lovers

Let’s remember the way we used to love each other
before we knew the shapes of our own sexes held open,
open and waiting for whatever violence the world might serve up

let’s go back, sisters
let’s go back, brothers
let’s go back, one-spirit or two
let’s go back and love each other in the dark, without reasons,
love each other through the winter like children can,
who have yet to discover the cruelties of love,
or of springtime.

Frances Donovan
Feb 10, 2008
Feb 14, 2008

The Couple on the Beach

She has hips unfashionably wide
but tanned, bikini-clad,
and capable of carrying her body
back and forth across the sand.

At the ocean, the clap of a hand,
the crack of a ball against a paddle
breaks above the shushing of the surf,
which drowns out murmuring voices,
erases names, words, whole sentences,
whole narratives.
It drowns out
who their parents are
and where they come from
and what they do when they are not here,
at this moment,
on this beach.

He cries in a register unfashionably high,
diving into the sea.
She waits on the sand for him,
watching with the love eye
and when he crawls back across the water to her,
she greets him with a towel,
picking up an empty wrapper as she goes.

I can't stop thinking
that the way he places his hands upon her hips right now
will be the same way he places his hands upon her hips tonight,
in some private room,
before leaning down to kiss
the underside of her belly.
I can't stop thinking of the moment
when he will dive into her,
what he will say to her
in time to her burgeoning moans.

I am in love with them both at this moment—
I love them with a swelling heart,
an open hand, an unfurling love
which encompasses all the animals on this beach:
the shrieking gulls and the children and their parents,
the young girls in their bikinis,
the zaftig woman in her two-piece,
the barrel-chested men with hairy backs,
the loud ones and the quiet ones,
the families and the lonely ones,
all that beauty,
all those rolls of flesh
all those crooks of nose,
all here on the beach,
loved by the ocean,
moved beyond the sound
of our own voices.


— Frances Donovan
August 2004
February 2008

"It's not a date, after all," you said,
brought me back to my senses
Must I always be the gallant,
all-Mother with the passenger door,
all-Mother with the check,
all-Mother with the the chicken soup
Must a femme send the flowers
while she glowers at her empty desk
a gift freely given
with love there is no freely given but
girlfriends
so much less trouble than
girlfriends
no U-Haul, no strap-on, no--Yes,
it's not a date with you,
always there for my birthdays
forsaking Jesus, let's eat that bastard
child of a Roman soldier
and suck the marrow from the bones of kindness.

Frances Donovan
February 9, 2008

What you want is not the blue
but the other
the part of it not your own.

The girl who serves you coffee:
hair hidden under fabric.
I'm sure it's beautiful, you say
and mean it -- the love not sexual
but open.

Alone is what you want.
Even at the tip of the land,
you cannot get free.

Voices follow you.
The memory of touch.
The pull, the solitude.

What really happens
is that a seagull cries.
Seaweed drips from its beak.
Sound moves over the harbor,
settling into pinks and blues
as the sun creeps
down the perfect sky.

Frances Donovan
January 2008