when love comes,
i hope he waits.

(in that spacce)

that by then my door
will be open, and the
house will be clean,

that he will wander
through the living room
for the first time since I
had been broken, when
he couldn't even find his
way through the mess--

a walking phenomenon
gliding through the kitchen
and out the backdoor,
when you come, love,
and the backdoor slams
i am knee deep in dried
leaves and ****,
wielding nothing but
yard tools and not
my heart chained to
the end of a virge
nothing but the
elegant vengance
towards wasps and
gardner snakes

both briefly carrying
heiligenschein against
the grass but

you will find i am
made of sweat and
warm lemonade
a pair of knees
embedded with
pebbles and clover
leaves,

love, bring your tools,
bring your faith,
the flint only i can
knap and I,
only you can
spark.

it's not as easy to imagine
your fingers as they used
to be, all these men have
had the same scars--

sometimes I see myself
here or there in a smaller body
from months ago, i wonder
about how i fell for you,
the night i was supposed to
go to Salida, up on Bellino
land before the drop off,
not leaving a single poem
out, because I wanted to be
heard and you heard

a grainy memory backlit
in your headlights, all just
crumpled tin cans and
riddled pigeon casings

i have never been good
             at
remembering the bad,
i have taken many deep
breaths, scraped and pulled
the threads from my steering
wheel, rubbed fingernail fissures
from my palms

i hope you come upon
true happiness, revelations
that clear barrel and hit the mark
i hope you find truth in all your anger
that one day you see me and
say
hello.

he kept asking why i was
making the face

what, you don't believe me?
no, I don't.

in fact everything he said had
a metallic ring, everything slid
too easily out of his mouth,
workin his tongue like it
had a slit or flossed his
teeth with thin fibs
don't take off their
boots 'cause they
know they gonna run

and it's funny 'cause
that's what I'm trying
not to do,

well if you have
to write a song about it
is it lifted from your heart?
did you press yourself
between the pages like a
daisy?

I did,





I did.

he* brought me out to the
                                     woodshed

gently opens the back door
but it slams behind us, pneumatic
cylinder busted so it catches my heels
and i slide off the last step
into the gravel and his steel-toes--

he silently brushes through the
prairie drop seed and mexican
feathergrass, nothing but an oil
stained back lumbering amidst the switch
eventide shivelight striking through
the creases in his ears

full of his old tools, horses,
hidden shelves--
and i've gone cold since
we left the house, a
**** frost set out
on my limbs 'cause
i know i done wrong
all the blessed evidence
up and down and that's
before he starts to turn--

ungive.

ungive.

did you think i was a dream?


oh, how I tried to be.


thin and watery, made to


fit around you so that you


might say I were the crepuscular rays


sheafs of sunlight held up like


taut ropes tied to the ledge


of heaven.

it has been storming so often

in the evenings he rolls over the city

so come down and meet me;
in the rain if you must--

I am too raw to do much else

most things ***** and push

but if this is the dust of your feet
then I'd lie in your wake

WHY'S YOUR DADDY GOT BLUE EYES?


it was never so much a question I heard
as much as one i thought, why's my daddy got blue eyes?

i used to peel this picture out
of the floral decopauge box
a sepia toned senior photo
of him in a varsity jacket
a wide spanish grin and
my full lips,
leonard scrawled on the
back, and why's your daddy got blue eyes?

I have always felt alone in this
body, a bit of my mother and none
of a father, have always
hated this brown
this skin filled with
shade, in the shadow
of girls with lean limbs
and long hair the color
of satin flower,
viridian eyes
that smile without tryin'
and long slender fingers
that'd be good for playin'
with children and kissing--

i have never
seen myself as anything else
than muddy water
always heavy, full
of sand, steaming earth
in the grasslands, dense
and bitter like orange rinds
too round, too full,
bubbling with all a manner
of pith and marrow
quick down in the mire
fixed into the silt

I have reached for the men
like the one in the photo,
dark and ethnic, pleading
for affirmation, that there
is beauty in brown, in
dusk, that I do not
have to be Rotomairewhenua
clear and effortless
that I can easily be
fresh and still
full of depth
and darker
hues.

why has my daddy got blue eyes, I wonder?