Such Deliberate Loveliness: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 1997-2006

dance meets your legs

  and though you move with such deliberate

  loveliness when your shape sways like

  some sublime string were pulling you by

  the grace of the rain, i know you are small

  inside, shyly trying to concoct more colors

  for me to wear like some angel’s umbrella to

  keep the delicate wings of your kiss protected

  from the splash made by this puddled poem

  9

  you are but a timeless poem waiting—

  for the rain. i lie awake nights

  just—to hear your song

  and in the slow shadow of the moon

  i have learned your curves. i know the

  lines of you—have memorized your spots.

  i know things about your breathing—

  gigantic, almost hidden things, that give

  rhythm to a world constantly holding time’s

  face to a dream, trying always to catch the

  wonderful wreck of your rain in its dull,

  dumb hands

  10

  my mind is carefully sleeping with you,

  hanging from the gigantic drops of the

  dream rain that pours from your drowsy

  lips like kisses learning to dive.

  to plunge

  myself down into the drain of this dream

  is to sink into piles of pools, stacking

  water like a house on my heart, built

  from the shapes of the puddles in your

  hair—twirlingtwirlingtwirling,

  and i will clumsy

  my way back from the depths of this dripping

  delusion, soaked in the ecstasy of love’s

  precision, falling toward the glimmer of

  you—and you are a light that grows inside

  me, lays on me like some lazy flower,

  and

  when my mind meets your mind in this heart’s

  house a sleepy surgery of sun will cut into the

  morning, and our flower will grow out like

  some god, poking holes in the sky for rain,

  and a fantastic flood of fingers will be whispering

  underwater without weight

  or meaning

  or questions

  11

  there is an echo in my body when your

  bones sing to a walk, a dream coming

  together like a note to a chord, vibrating

  laughter to lay a healing on my heart,

  carving a memory out of the melody in

  your mouth—musically breezing my

  mind, building a better beautiful

  for the ellipses

  for the ellipses

  for the …rain

  12

  your hands hold my wishes, hang my wishes

  from your fingers like sleep,

  my dreams lay on your palms, press flat against

  your face(too busy being pretty to open those

  whispers of wings)

  and rosebuds sprout from these words, petals

  float inside somewhere making birds from the

  heat of your hands

  (growing more dreams

  than sleep can catch,

  more wishes than math

  can count),

  opening—hand to mouth—like a yawn to a smile

  13

  these fingers crawl across your kiss, stretch

  around your face like a shattering

  these hands make playthings of your pinkness,

  build gigantic beautiful tides swelling against

  your songs, stopped up with kisses

  these eyes watch the shimmy of the lips,

  the heave of those squirming hips, and there

  is a wiggle in my world that breaks open a

  little alive thing, a new breathing in my

  bones—whirling like blood in the lungs,

  pulling the air out like dancing to death

  14

  and this darkness is a screaming, saving memories,

  hiding movies and sketches under the skin,

  unpainted places where delicate flags breathlessly

  squirm over the mind for future nights, where moons

  hide behind dreams, looking out to catch the children

  bathing in the summer moonlight—fireflies dazzling

  these later curves of you that happen far away, some

  elsewhere place where flowers grow from the falling

  rain, petals storming on the fields of our house like an

  impressionist’s hand were opening a fresh world for

  god to worship

  but the wind grows tired like minds do, and bodies

  lose inches of melody like songs slowing to a strained

  hush of somewhere sound, and we travel miles for the

  old magic of rain—music that more than whispers—that

  you and i have both, sadly, mysteriously forgotten

  until piles

  of rainy flowers are found hanging secrets from your hair,

  catching my breath once the right way, and a sound is

  heard—something like birds washing memories with

  snowsongs—that makes dying seem like a lovely hurricane

  in the heart

  15

  what is it about you that makes poetry in me? is

  it a recipe of wants made in words? is it the way your

  curves lure me into happy convulsions? is it your

  smell? is it the way your hair lies on my dreams—like

  puddles, like fresh breath, like morning’s summer?

  16

  her voice skips like a stone on the

  water, a song that hesitates on air and

  slides across my blood like a stream

  into a river, moving quietly into the ocean

  that rests on my bones, and i wait patiently

  drowning for her to breathe my name, utter

  a lovely contrivance of calm to slide me

  through to something like a ceremony for

  her lips, where she might move her fingers

  meticulously designing melodies to move

  across my mouth making kisses erupt from

  this mountain where secrets fall like something

  marvelously softer than the rain, leaving nothing

  behind but wet mind wiggles or the scent of the

  hints she hides in her hair

  and she is a mystery solemnly unsolvable—yet

  i fall,

  i watch for the bloom to pop again, wait

  for the flower to spread its lovely hands over me,

  dropping its petals(more fragile than forever guessing

  at what color her life gives the wind),

  floating

  silently into a clarity of character, a story told

  when the sun passes by the stars, and i wade through

  to a dream that droops deeper than air can go, but

  where i can hear every breath she makes

  17

  i feel a memory waking you up in my heart,

  a slow, dusty grinding in the chest that remembers

  and then forgets like a blinking book, a pumping

  that grows out like a bright beautiful bombing and

  then hides inside like a life tinily afraid,

  a hole is left where shoutings are kept, where the

  little cracks and breaks stretch across the brain like

  veins and i can hear you laugh, a happy sound that

  means you loved me once, real and smiling like a

  time far away when the world was small and uncruel

  and you and i were the only stars in a sky torn

  open and leaking heaven on a lovely piece of

  dream to hold onto when nights are late and

  lonely is everywhere and listening
for anywhere

  footsteps or somewhere else kisses or touching

  where the heat is so hardly remembered

  18

  so it is true we share the rain and the

  wet is like a sex under our skins, making

  heat in the absence of touching, and you

  are far away from the holes inside me, and

  there is no empty like a hollow without some

  singing

  and there are no puddles in this pale paradise,

  nothing to drink but old words to remember,

  old hurts to forget, and the sound you made

  when our love was a soft collision—that music

  is better than the rain, better than the downpouring

  of every need being filled with the echo of something

  as solid as your kiss, your whisper, your hair brushing

  by my ears whispering winds like spring or birds or

  flowers coming undone near that crevice where your

  neck meets your shoulder,

  and i bend to rest a lip across this undoing, and

  i can hear it, it grows like afterlives promising

  clouds where we can hide our silences in a spray

  of sparks, water, and breezes blowing stars out

  like fireworks turning flowers into confetti, blooming

  out like the slow hesitation of a newborn touch,

  whispering again—in this great grave of lonely—

  somewhere snow

  19

  mesmerized by the milkshake twilight

  of an early autumn morning, you are sweetly

  biting those sunlit lips

  with secrets and kisses

  i hide my face in the blankets

  of our body’s beds and dream

  about the licorice lullaby that you sang

  to me when you swallowed my full

  heart with your hovering hands

  20

  there is a prayer in this poem

  a blessing wished out like

  a hand through a child’s hair

  that perhaps it is true that your lovely

  is the shape of my heart and that your eyes

  shine on me with a sun

  that even stars can’t properly imagine

  there is a wish planted

  in the soil of this kiss

  where the liquid of your last love will

  fill the world with

  a rain of petals

  and in the meditation of milk baths that

  lie in wait over your kisses i know that angels share this light like

  a child dancing in the shower of the spring’s first rain

  and all the while the world is waiting

  for the flowers, waiting for the fragrance

  of your forgiving, waiting for the forgetting you share

  with silently touches

  21

  here in the hazy heart of the last world’s

  gasp for air is a bursting of birth that blows

  out the lights in the mind like a memory coming

  undone to pour out an old song, an old lovely