by Paul Hina
you,
holding tight to your tangle of a kiss
while your hair is hot in my face—
smells like something summer,
i sneak a glance down at the neverland
of your knees,
slide my eyes down your ankles,
and you sway just so,
steal my breath away,
and we both might as well just swim,
get lost at sea
12
i marvel at your shy discomfort
with your hands,
hiding them
then
checking them,
speaking with them and
through them,
finding your thigh
then
the back of your neck
—all places i have memorized
and you calm this nervous
frenzy of fingers
by resting them
against your cheeks
—a marvelous frame for a face—
and your eyes gleam
with natural wetness and
i think of the years
of beauty that remain,
and i try to steal your self-doubt
with smiles
and flirtations—
the telepathy of lips
and whispers
13
her beautifully shaped shoulders
are begging to be touched,
she brushes by one,
pushing her hair away,
leaves the hand there,
her fingers tracing the collar
of the shoulder,
pressing and playing on the bone,
her head leans to that side,
hair hangs down—a curtain for
the theater of her face—
and when she smiles at me,
i snap the picture, frame it,
pour it—melting hot—into my mind
for when i am older
and beauty is something that
i find harder to reach
14
your full head of hair, brown and full
of life, flush with the scent of flowers,
is where the birdsongs go at night to
find the warmest reasons to sing,
and the landscape of your beautiful face,
the muddy water that runs from your neck to
your shoulders, is enough to cast siren
songs against your bones between waves
of sinful sensations,
and to hear your voice, to hear the songs
you stow in your hair, i would swim through
any sea, storm any beach just to touch that
face, that young skin, comb that perfect
hair with my imperfect fingers, listen to
the sleep of those softest strings vibrating
all the stars awake, startled by the brilliance
of your floating lilts, your hungry hums
15
she entered the room, all yellow in
the summer light, half swallowed up
by august's brightest fingers,
and her silhouette was breathing, easing
in and out of the bright wave of heat that
caressed her,
the curves of her body moved here and there
like beauty molding itself from naked light
and sun,
and she—yellow with wonder and
wake-up wishes—owned the light, smiled for
every kiss she'd yet to taste,
and the bright stain of electric lemon(and the
sweet) from each kiss stuck to her mouth like
wet paint
16
her waves of hair
move back and forth
through my fingers,
the smell of surf and sand
falls from those fronds,
unfurling fruit strings
and filaments of feathers
to shock the skin
with the simple thought
of her kiss—
like the sounds of birds
off somewhere admiring
the song of the sea—
landing on my mouth
with the softest feet
of her lips,
moving me like water
moves the moonlight,
lulling me
toward dreams of sirens
and effortless swimming,
tickled by the tremendous tides
of her hips and thighs
17
i'm careful when i touch her
skin—so soft, so slippery—
and when the sun opens up
her body, limb by limb, from
the darkness and the gray night
bleeds into gold, the trees dance
around her with leaves shimmering
from shadows to shine,
and i reach, carefully—not to protect
her,
no.
but to hush the heat of my
heart
and she shutters awake, lets the
dreams out from her hundred leafy
hands, lifting the light with the brilliance
of birdsong slicing open the night's
silence
18
her happy, easy smile is barely
visible through the mist of memory,
but the sound of her speaking my name
is like water pouring a better purity on
a past's reflection,
and her skin still shines through the
haze of our history,
and i breathe, keep the tide of time at a
distance, push away all the noise, all the
meaninglessness, embrace the infinity of
nothingness(the wet clarity that dulls the
aches of life),
and i hold tight to the ghost of her, breathe in
more of her old air, recreate the clarity of her
wind blown hair in poems on condensation
glass
19
that dreary, dull ache of
life settles deep in the stomach,
swimming down, down, down
into the places dreams go to hide
when sleep is a distant voice,
hardly audible in the rain of this
rancid routine of days,
and all i do here in this vacuum is
watch for lights, breathe in, and wait
for the scent she carries with her—
the flowers of life she tucks in her
homes of hair,
and the birds' breath she shares with
the kisses in her mouth—the whispers
and the shivers, the wash and the shores
of her—is what makes sleep most serene,
and what makes the days and the waiting
so deliriously like the dust that shakes
from dreams is the whimsy of a slow,
summer rain building to a storm
20
i watch your sweet, sleep of a body
stretch into a yawn,
your arms reach toward last night's
water, submerging the memory of
our stars,
and your arching back slithers into
a mesmerizing curve—
a magnificent Donatello coming
uncracked
and the morning muses of birds are
singing for you
and to my ears, your songs are popping
up everywhere for me to pluck with
these dreaming fingers, to taste every
drowsy petal as poems shed my lips
like an easy conversation with the rain
21
the symmetry of her face swings
across my eyes like a swim,
her tiny wrists l
ead to long fingers,
married fingers, that lift her chin to
a consecrated smile—a small curve
of the lips, long and pinkishly full—
and there are songs wiped across that
mouth, melodies of moondrops that
have grown from the rich night soil
into sparks of stars arcing in the sky,
and, as she sighs, and an ember somewhere
explodes into sleep, i make a wish, a wish
that permits me to hold the burden of
something so heartbreaking, something
as unfathomably soft as what's harnessed
in her Hellenic hands
22
her wonders of legs move her
across the wind with the elegance
of wings, each step moving her
further through the air than the
birds that float beside her,
and her breath—cool and white
in this cold snap of a breeze—
might as well be a sweet song of
candy for the leaves, all of them
falling to catch a hint of her kisser's
mouth, her meaning,
and she is the melody that the
birds dangle by—just close enough
for deciphers that dwindle into
disciples of sing-song syllables
23
it wasn't her, her bangs falling
in her face, her thin arms—tiny
wrists. But it wasn't her. i thought
i was sure from her profile that
she was some sort of a unique,
wonderful thing, and she was, but
without the shine of the girl with
heartbreak in her hair, the golden
knowledge in her bright stare, that girl
is the meaning of the search, she
is the truth without words, and, in
the fall, she is the wonder of
the world, the color and the wind
24
she sits, reading, her white legs like
cream dripping from her hips, pushing
deep into the foreground, one leg crosses
slowly over the other, and makes miracles
from ordinary lines,
and she is sweetly unaware of the
amazing shapes she makes, oblivious
to the geometry of her beauty, unknowing
of the math in each meticulous bending of
life's waves that compliment the softest
arcs of a woman, young and beautiful
and innocently glowing with modest
deflection, leaving white circles burning
in my eyes, breathing bright to dim and
back again
25
i am dreaming of the spring fondles,
pausing the world as the petals rain
down against our flesh—
fragrant with new life and
deeper breaths—
and your lips part and press against
my fingers, and the trees shake off
the winter with the warmest arms
of leaves
and hair
and flowers
26
fragments of you materialize from
the soft spatterings of rain,
and the hard splash on the floor of
dying leaves reminds me of the lack
of you,
the memory of autumns without you
are prevalent and precious,
places i remember where poetry breathed
like great gushes of ghosts appearing to
whisper your name in my ear,
a great
