Such Deliberate Loveliness: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 1997-2006
Paul Hina
Copyright ©2006 by Paul Hina
the trilogy of curves
I. little births
1
the day before, or the morning
to no man that listens is the sound
not heard and to no man who knows
god is there not a place for holes
to be buried in when she sends you
for rest and if she’s rubbed your
heart then you, as i, can still hear
the breeze of her movements closing
in and
the breath of her mouth as it swept
by and shook my eyes free of death
with a kiss (a kiss that is lost within
the silence she possesses in my throat)
and as her curling mouth was shutting
me down i sunk with her in sleep and
she turned me over and into her love
leading me with forgotten hands to
fall into the breaking day and as the
day breaks away her lashes wave me
farewell and
the air and i are tiny as she leaves
us behind breathing and listening to
her hair run slightly, unearthly, across
my face whispering birds and
i will remember all the angel’s dust
falling on wings as sweet as the cotton
that blows from a spring child’s mouth
and
i can’t forget the innocence of that
same child’s tear as its softness
nears the ending sky’s eye with the
wind and
can you hear her hair?
2
i reach towards a twinkle as tiny
as my eyes are allowed to imagine
and as large as the ocean’s sun
drenched gleam
for a single moment an infinite
wave curls me into digging deeper
towards the breath of all the
drowning children scraping towards
the sky
and, me, falling under in the
playground of tranquility wishing
upon the yellow light that drips
through the cracks every time i
speak her name
to whom does this star speak or
answer his wishes for (as it hangs
towards the last moment)
grant me the little dances our
legs create swimming near one
another to waltz slowly past a
and like children gasping for laughter
we’d lose each other’s sorrow in the
holes left inside our smiles
give me this second as i fall away
racing towards heaven
and the light i see shines the soft
hair on her chin as white as a new
snow and as innocent as the night
before the white falls on a time of
trees
3
a blanket of grace her presence
presents me inside is as still
as the air that hangs outside
her
all the wishes that succumb from
within my world tremble from the
view of all those diving horses
as they hiss inside their white
breath
the noise of twilight sits beside
my turn as the cowardly face being
scorned by the steps that she crunches
on the fall
and our love is being joined by a
goodnight kiss that is being smoked
from the spinning fields of my memory’s
impotence
i can’t recollect the texture of her
lips and all the knowing of smoothness
that infected my fingers when i brushed
by her face
and the push of her breath like a dancing
execution on my palm that never ceased
to shut my eyes
if my lids would live then maybe, only
maybe, i could stop trembling
losing the summer of her grace
4
(why if wings spread like fingers
do we squeeze our hands so tightly
around our flightless feet)
so our infinity is disturbed by the
awakened girls shining over moons
of blue light cities and shares a
tendency to scare this young child
who has lost his mother to a storm
of the same caliber
and because she is gone does the
distance mean to swallow every
gulping heartbeat like a paper
song covering the truth and protecting
the threats of making him miss one
more day of trains or noise of softly
smothered spirits
he can never move fast enough for
pictures and his tiny fingers so
full of youth and love are yet to
touch the frailty that was placed
inside the woman’s eyes that once
tucked him inside her womb with a
constant kiss that smelled of hearing
the ocean’s calm
her stare turns him inside the outer
regions of sanity because of the dreams
that smile green like her eyes and
will she ever look at him again?
this night child struggles in his
thinness looking for a larger remnant
of her moon’s closeness to feed his
pale hunger towards a lighter relief
and why if her face is in his head
burning out the night’s silence is
she not less than ash and more than
rain?
how do you whisper death when the sky
she spoke of in fairy tales turns black?
(letting go and learning to fly)
5
a tragedy that is standing looking by
hushing for less breath than is her face
is moving in her smile that sprinkles
words of candles surrounding baths of
fingers and flesh
his chest swollen by her dancing and his
eyes paralyzed inside kisses of timelessness
that fall from his drinking glass of her
shade (slightly less pink than her movement)
she glides pulling up her dress to reveal
her feet and he knew if only in a dream
that nothing as precise as her feet (not
even death) could approach standing still
in their delicately placed cases entrapped
by toes to move nothing but slow
her steps softly whispered in the air of
the doorway’s darkness and he sat rubbing
tears from his fingertips dwelling far
beyond the untouched
and he stands waiting in her vast country
counting snow as it calms the cool ground
in the key of a traditional waterfall
6
weightless in sleep reaching
for a lucid face in the
interior of midnight’s sister
her kiss removes
a gleam from my
eye like spiders with
cr
awlers
deeply stretching
throughout this america
i swim in sanctity of once myself
in mind will echo through pages
of graffiti on her neon walls
and my death will smile
upon her moon by
stars
that now are eyes
but i can not harm
the lady
for even my feet
when embedded in her
greyest of sands
still float
farther than any imagination
and because even her pools
are more than
all of me
and deeper than all dreams
7
there is a tunnel some song travels
through taking me towards the holy
ground that was our church where we
worshipped inside each other’s eyes
and got lost in the inflection of “i
love you”
and your reflection in the window is
still sticking to the glass unstained
by your smile and even though the
pictures of you i’ve developed have
begun losing color from too much
recollection it is still clear that
all i ever knew about life dwells
inside that smile
and even though the words you spoke
inside our story are fading from a
thousand fingers turning pages for
every crying eye your voice is still
prominent in my sleep
and i relax on the walls of an apparition
and kiss her at the top of my lungs
stirring another lump in my throat sugar
coated from all those tiny breaths that
caused me to drown in her mouth
and so i fall like water collecting
puddles of little pieces that are her
steps brushing away like a criminal’s foot
and she can’t blow kisses that taste
like the life i knew beyond her skin
and so i pray
has anyone written a song that travels
deeper than tunnels?
8
there was a window i saw you
through being wrapped knees
inside arms and eyes inside
sleep with face slightly
falling form neck to shoulder
and i watched for forever to
disappear before i thought of
allowing myself to blink
because an image of sleep is
slower dying than a picture
of something smaller that falls
sooner than rain
so a