Origami Moonlight: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2009-2012
joyful, sleepy rivers
90
her hair is as thick as thieves, as
straight and reckless as a nighttime
waterfall,
her mist and her whispers are full
of daydreams and slithery secrets
that jump and dive into her cresting
umbrella of moonlit rain
and when her song drops, it sounds like
the muffles from inside a womb, or the
mind becoming beautifully uncracked
in the moment before she steals a kiss,
or like the buzz my mind makes when
her approaching fingers stretch around
the back of my black puddles of hair,
smearing away the rain
91
all the white lights of the storm
blew through night's window,
projecting her sweet silhouette
across this dream,
and her approaching steps are shushes
of whispers in my ears, something like
her softest breathing beating its
wings on the house of this sleep,
blowing into me her most lovely,
waiting kisses,
and the thunder shook all her secrets
free,
and we were tangled together,
spinning in the wet electricity of
blue lyrics sliding over our flesh
with the shock of a thousand songs
being set free
92
you glow yellow and white in my
mind at night,
your phantom dust floats through my
dreams like pompoms of dandelion
seeds,
and you radiate joy and old whispers
across my subconscious waters,
send a current so electric through me
that memories bolt back to life,
and our bodies become a song so swimming
with sleep that we concoct storms where
stars stir wayward waterfalls
and flowers fall like snow and stutter across
our silvery, moonlit lake of skin
93
you are the hope on the shore,
the dreamy mist above the foamy
waters of memory,
you are the sounds of the birds
somewhere circling in the foggy
distance of dreams,
you are a kiss of salty wind
from the ocean's morning, waiting
for the sun to melt away its meaning,
to get lost in a flood of summer songs,
to succumb to the somewhere shadows
of reverie's birds
94
your curls hang down, softly
bang on your neck, melt over
your shoulders like lazy mud
trickling down your chest—
fingers of fudgy kisses,
and when you lean to rest your
cheek on your shoulder, the room
is arrested, intoxicated by your
downcast eyes, stuck in the sweet
muck of your sensational existence,
your merest movement, your barest
breath rising you up, sending the
slightest stutter of exposed skin
like a blast of warm wind through
the room—the smell of a coming
rain about to calm the hot, hot heat
95
she's a fading mystery, a misty memory
falling from nighttime clouds, a fog in the
morning, the whisper in between the hairs
on my skin standing on end,
she is the hole in my heart, the harps i hide,
the music that slides inside my soul like a secret
waiting to descend, envelop, and answer her
absence with the tenderness of raindrop fingers
feeling for kisses in the songs of this snow
covered skin, seasons buried by seasons,
whispers of songs hung from the long
fallen leaves
96
i can't find you in the breeze of spring,
i can't smell you in the flowers, hear you
when the birds sing.
my hands can't pour you out on paper,
and the art you gave me is only half off
the ground, still trying to fly.
my mind can't find you in sleep,
digging through dreams for a taste
of your lips, sifting through memory's
papers for the shape of your hips,
or the heat of my hand as it floated on
the small of your back.
and even your voice is gone, bare as the
cloudless sky, and blue, so breathtakingly,
heartbreakingly blue.
97
your face is so small and pretty,
an unbelievably perfect arrangement
of features, elegantly plucked from the
artist's fingers and pressed to your smoothest,
alabaster skin,
your symmetry makes painter's blush
and sculptor's surrender their chisels
just to know your cheekbones with their
fingers,
and art is the highest meditation on life,
and you are the breathtaking venus
pouring down light from your starlit face,
like buddha on the mountaintop, holding
all of heaven's kisses of enlightenment
from beauty's highest elevations
98
you are a plum
that stings the tongue,
a kiss so sweet
that the mind remembers
your mouth
with the clarity of a tragedy—
red burned in the mind
like watching a murder
or catching a birth
with bare hands,
you are a poem
so slow
that i can savor all its juices,
sink my teeth
into every word
and watch them bleed
onto pages of pain
that breathe and pulsate,
dance and sing.
99
to reason with the rain, to reach for
its rhythm, is to make sense of the
distorted puddles of memory, the wash
that age gives your mind.
there are still dreams—youthful and sunny
with smiles—faint glimpses where bubbles
pop in the subconscious
and you are there, standing, clearly, without
the blur or the noise of time, until the rain,
that sad music plays its fingers over the
surface of memory, like a piano whispering
a sadder song from a cave in the heart,
echoing,
echoing
the sound of your distant breath
100
your lazy, yellow hair points toward
your tangled lips, where fingers twist
future kisses from the fruits of a dream,
and these surreal fruits send saccharine
shivers up your slender arms—arms built
for swimming in the black muck of night's
star water—caught in the swirl between
flying and falling.
and when you lean your head back, let your
hair emulate the pointing stars, you let the
spin of the cosmos twirl you all the way to
love, bending a hundred rainbows toward
memory-melts of movies, lilts of old radio
songs buzzing in your submerged ears
101
she doesn't understand how the skin
of her shoulders is like milk poured
over the mind—a was
h of cool white
light glowing with hope
she doesn't understand how her leg
under her body, her hand draped
lazily across her naked ankle, makes
men ache to learn the rhythm of that
pulse, feel it like music breathing
against their bodies
she doesn't understand how her mouth
—lips curled in half-smiles, eyes cast
down(surrounded by dark lashes)—
sends a shiver of joy that bends
mouths, pours caramel kisses over
shoulders, dripping down backs,
leaving little licks of wishes stained
on phantom flesh
102
when you smile and spin that hair to fall
over your shoulder, there is a sudden
rhythm to the world, a meaning that your
fingers(practiced) stretch through your
tresses, leaving chocolate strands to smear
the flesh of your neck,
and your face is even sweeter, a more perfect
art than any mother Mary pose,
and music follows your footsteps wherever
those long melodies of legs take you—even
if away from me—
a slow song dancing in the distance of memory's
slow, withering delirium
103
all of those spring muses have
matriculated with the clouds,
gone swimming with the raindrops,
forgotten all the poems,
forgotten all those puddle-reflected kisses—
the shudder up the spine when fingers
intertwine—
they've slept in the sky's softness
long enough to lose the words,
the poems become sloven and blurry
like a thing you're sure you used to touch
but can't quite remember its shape,
its dizzying curves
104
your grace is quiet, doesn't wake
the air around you when you move.
your steps are soft and you glide
across a room as if the earth pulled
your long legs through a wall of whispers.
and when you speak, secrets—like songbirds—
drip from your every word,
painting poems on the surface of my skin—
shivers shaking sonnets from goosebumps
105
my mind moves miles and miles around the
landscape of your shape, traverses the bumps
and the dips, sightsees for hips and shoulders,
stretches credulity to perfectly trace the small of
your back, or the rush of a whisper that wraps
around your thigh,
and i can hear movements of music born around
your naked shoulders, taste kisses on the lines
that built your lips,
and you travel, leaving only maps behind—shapes
and curves obscured by dust on paper—
and i sail away on fantasies of your flesh,
poems floating behind me like snowflakes caught in
your breath
106
when we're together, in the wind,
there is a wreck of hands, a chaos
of touches that fall over us like thickest
rain,
your kisses are like the snow