Love and Cover

As I pass Fran she covers her words with an arm
She writes in her own version of longhand
In that strange and wonderful print and write combo that she uses even through a single word
That I know so well now, and find somehow so innocent and beautiful
Like Fran herself, though she knows words that no innocent knows
And has flung a few my way over the course of these years when anger infused us
Those days are far between and forgotten as soon as peace is reached with a kiss
Her laptop sits unused in front of her arm
And she knows more than I how to use it
We share it and so her words stay on paper
As though she still retains some embarrassment from her mother’s mouth
A witch of a woman with a cold heart and mind
Who gave birth with a grunt and a slap of her own hand across the face
And never gave a compliment without a thorn in it
So you could be sure that she never meant the words
A woman that I still can’t see making love to a man
Even in my nightmares or wild imaginings
Though that man must have broken her badly when he stole away in the night
And took all her love with him
But left beautiful Fran in his wake to take his verbal beatings
Her hardness and hatred somehow released some soft imagination in Fran
I see the hand of some kind of God or Goddess at work there
She had the ability to land me hard in love after just a few words
And I hear it to this day
Though in truth I had to fight hard to get her to trust me
And then love me herself
Over the course of two years of the longings of a man
And the cold loneliness of winter beds never filled
With the sweat of love and desire shared by two
Only the hardness of a man alone with his imagination
She has told me herself that she writes poems about love
But I have never seen them and never will
Since it is not in me to break that hard won trust and love
And to risk losing my lover and friend
By breaking the spine of the thin book of poems that bears her name and makes it known to the world
Just to steal a look at those words
That she has said are dedicated to me but I know are private
Since she wrote them while using her arm to cover them from me