Author: Frances Donovan

I like poetry, long walks on the beach, and democracy. Tending the Garden of Words (www.gardenofwords.com) since 1998.
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The Drama of the Disoriented Traveler

M thought we’d postpone the trip until June, but he underestimated the pull of California. I may be Yankee-bred, but I’m California-born, and that handful of years I spent there shifted me in some fundamental way a born-and-bred New Englander can’t comprehend. If I don’t feel the humid air and smell the eucalyptus once a year — preferably before the cherry blossoms burst out on the East Coast — I get very cranky. And nobody likes a cranky Okelle.

So what if we had just expended time and energy taking two households and combining them into one? Since when has an empty bank account — or exhaustion — ever stopped me from hopping on a plane to someplace warm?

When I’m feeling ashamed or embarrassed, M will say, “I love you because you’re a woman of strong passions.” Which calms me down a bit, strips away the old intensity of perfectionism. And allows me to forgive myself for dragging him off to my homeland before either of us was really ready.

On the upside, I’d been saving for the trip in advance and definitely stayed within my budget. On the downside, he bought the rip-off rental car insurance and couldn’t say the same thing. On the upside, we tooled around in a Mustang convertible so new, we had to break open the shrink-wrap on the owner’s manual. And he finally me the rest of my family. And after almost 800 miles negotiating the tiny roads that run from valley to valley, he was ready to admit that maybe California had a certain appeal. The upsides have it.

About 24 hours after we arrived at SFO, after an extra-long day that took us from the Embarcadero to Muir Woods and then to the rest of San Francisco, we met his brother at a Boston bar called, ironically enough, Connecticut Yankee. The aroma of 100 years’ worth of spilled beer greeted us at the door. Since I can no longer drink the tasty, hoppy, liquid bread — and since I’d spent the better part of the day pounding pavement and mud with my jet-lagged legs — I was more than a little cranky by the end of dinner. Cranky enough to make a bratty declaration and go for a walk before the check came.

Here’s what I wrote while standing at a mailbox outside of a boarded-up dot-com startup, taking deep breaths and regarding the San Francisco skyline while hipsters bar-hopped all around me. I won’t apologize for it, but I will say it’s very much worthy of my inner 13-year-old, who was very much running the show at that moment:

stand with legs closed
san francisco’s silhouette in the distance

inhaling, heart pounding
one breath, one moment, one breath

sometimes nothing heals but time
sometimes nothing fills the god-shaped hole

all day walking
through the city
through the redwoods

foreign city, foreign parts
foreign homeland

distress of disconnection
a technology deeper than time
wider than space

one moment, one moment
and then the next

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Three San Francisco Haiku: Phoenix Hotel in the Tenderloin

Three haiku at the Phoenix Hotel on the edge of the Tenderloin

san francisco streets
wrought iron gate, open sky
urban oasis

blue mosaic pool
low chairs arranged artfully
artwork, fountains, fire

outside, the homeless
squeal of buses, 6am
unmerited gifts

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Rest in Peace Adrienne Rich: Fellow Poet, Feminist, Queer Woman, Trail-Blazer

Last week, I was about to board a plan to San Francisco when I saw Adrienne Rich’s obituary on the front page of the New York Times.

It’s hard to describe Adrienne Rich’s impact on my life with grace and brevity. That’s because my relationship to her work mirrors my relationship to the literary establishment as a whole. I first heard of her when I was a junior in high school, young poet full of promise and bereft of friends after the class of 1989 graduated and scattered off to college. A precocious freshman named Deborah, with reddish hair and presumptuous mannerisms, was shocked to learn I hadn’t already read and loved her work. What Deborah didn’t know (and neither did I) was that I’d been raised on the literary canon, comprised then as it is now almost exclusively of men. Five years later I wrote my senior thesis at Vassar on her work and the arc of her life. Seventeen years later, Margalit Fox‘s obituary said it better than I ever could.

Continue reading “Rest in Peace Adrienne Rich: Fellow Poet, Feminist, Queer Woman, Trail-Blazer”

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Empty Pond, Full Sky

what does it mean to be empty
and what does it mean to be full?

empty air
over the still glass
surface of the pond

empty belly

geese make
full-throated calls,
expectant

on a monday after the clocks change–
magic hour of daylight
missing hour of sleep

banks empty
still winter-brown

the fluttering sound
of a goose
drinking from the pond
she glides across

empty water, swirling,
then still
after her passing

the park full
of people stunned
at the way winter falls away

the playground full
of children shouting
in foreign tongues

pen drops from my hand
over the empty boulder
into the clear water
rests on the empty bottom

my womb, empty again

this moment
full of silence

this mind
full of the moment
blessed
empty

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It Gets Better

I got my 1.5 seconds of Youtube fame in this video put together by the Harvard Medical School community for the It Gets Better project.

Link in case the embed fails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOo7ZtjKBI

Living well is often the best revenge. Every GLBT person who lives through the hell of childhood and adolescence in a homophobic society is a hero in my eyes.

If you have the time, the resources, and the intestinal fortitude, I also encourage you to take more direct action to improve the lives of young people currently living through that hell. Things have gotten better than they were when I was a child and a young woman. And in many places there is still plenty of room for improvement. The Make it Better Project is one way you can make a difference in the lives of GLBT, questioning, and allied youth today.

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Dear Neighbor I Offended this Saturday While Disposing of My Trash at the Communal Dumpster

When you and your wife/girlfriend/mistress/love slave started yelling at me for putting my plastic bag full of plastic bags into the mostly-empty paper bag that you had deposited at the steps of the mostly-full dumpster near our dwellings, I thought perhaps that you had recycling in it.

So I asked if I had mistakenly mixed my garbage with your recycling. But no, it appears that you were in fact offended by the promiscuous mingling of our household detritus.

I still think this is crazy, which is why I said things like “What’s the big deal? Trash is trash!”

I don’t really know what you started shouting back at me, because I was in fact carrying on a conversation with my mother via cell phone at the same time. Upon reflection, this is probably what really upset you: not my cavalier attitude toward the mingling of household garbage, but the fact that I never stopped to give you my undivided attention. Or maybe you were mad because you thought I expected you to throw my trash into the dumpster with your trash. Or maybe you have some kind of garbage fetish that requires you and your love slave to personally handle all trash before it goes in the dumpster. Like I said, I really wasn’t paying attention.

I’m not sure if you heard me say (and later — as your own voice rose in volume — shout) things like “I’m so sorry for having offended you, sir,” because you were going on about something or another. Like I said, I really wasn’t listening. I could tell you were angry, though, and apparently because of something I had done. In my humble opinion, you and your love slave are both wound a little too tight about how your trash is disposed of.

Do you not understand the concept of trash? Do you not know where trash goes? Have you never been to a dump or a landfill? Did you think the sanitation workers took each little bag of trash and gave it a decent burial, with maybe a headstone and a prayer? Do you think there is a trash embalming center somewhere? Or were you really just offended because I never bothered to put down my cell phone and treat you like a human being instead of an animated speed bump?

I know how annoying multitasking cell-phone users can be. So, for demeaning your inherent worth and dignity by shouting nice things I clearly didn’t mean and walking off before you could explain yourself, I do apologize. Perhaps we’ll meet again at the dumpster and I will have the opportunity to amend my behavior.

In the meantime I suggest you take a deep, cleansing breath, and try not to get too worked up about what happens to your garbage once you put it down in front of the dumpster. It’s only garbage, after all — one thing that we Americans have in abundance.

Sincerely,

Me