Read Such Deliberate Loveliness: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 1997-2006 Page 13

spring,

  where you danced like a walk spinning towards me

  with a smile surrounded by the angelic lights of a may

  day—those hips a-sway like a hesitation heaven—

  and i fade out like light through a straw

  watching you watching me

  one last time with all that love in your eyes,

  youth and the heart filling us up like idyllic wings

  flapping a new breeze where a clean world might emerge,

  more beautiful than the last, more lovely than lavender

  or mist

  or spring

  or your naked body clothed only by the sun

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  the spray of starlight on your skin, a wash of

  moonlight that lays on your thigh, exposed with

  the ease of an elegant reminder of grace and youth

  warms me full like a fire that forgets fuel and burns

  brighter still in the secrets of the shadows that hide

  your hands so that i can’t touch them to wake you

  for a slow, silent sex

  i’ll watch you breathe, the rising of your chest,

  your breasts, the quiet white of a whisper, lulls

  my sleepy eyes into a dream where dancing is as

  effortless as walking while the children sleep, cozy

  and coded in our life, and we can share the day’s

  discoveries with the same wonder and desire of first

  touch tangles, because who knows when, who knows

  kiss, who knows this much more about you

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  you mind the mystery of me, make a memory

  of a younger face within me when my hands

  were stronger and there was that sound of

  massaging out whispers, always new rainy

  puddles of push when i laid my hands on you,

  a soft recognition of inner noise where fragility

  hangs faint futures off piling up pasts,

  but always pretty you, always quietly storing bursts

  of beautiful in the present, playful places where

  we might open and close our clothes like a heart

  were being bled just for the feeling, just a life tangled

  up together climbing a clumsy wondercluster of

  yesterdays and tomorrows

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  there is a musical vibration beneath the walls of

  this dream, little dancers that present the rhythm of

  my sleep with excited breaths, many birdsounds turn

  to emulate the song of the snows of youth, and i am

  quietly remembering a younger man, painfully in love

  with a reckless heart and mind full of hurricanes and

  power surges crashing into the water left by the rain

  of her hands, those fingers stretching across my face,

  waking up in the science of a kiss, a man from a boy,

  an idea to life, a breath into a poem

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  you can not press a cloud for rain when

  the veil of storms has collapsed on the lap

  where your mother made you from stars, and

  those maternal smells, those whispering mother

  moments you find in the strange corners of the mind

  are a standard where loveliness makes new places to

  hold close to the heart like a secret where memories

  are held in a box where the soul is unopened and

  all your dreams and melodies are yet to be discovered,

  where all the talents of dancing and perfumed kisses

  sit and wait for you to comfort them into life, for life to

  bloom from the storage of a silent soul

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  my hands make secrets of tenderness

  when we touch, these fingers build

  musical mythologies on your pinkest

  skin, spreading out petals like pressing

  palms on the sheets of this silk sex where

  paint is poured on later dreams and light

  shows colors to miracles and magic shines

  one more sensational star a way out of heaven

  to plant a puddle on this angel’s kiss, my angel,

  damp and delirious like a breathing were coming

  undone in the heart, a lyrical pain that shoots songs

  like the sun waking up a memory of paradise you thought

  you knew but was always hiding somewhere in her hair

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  i’ve watched your body dance waist deep

  in wonderful while silently i sat stretching

  songs out in the rhythm of your walk, where

  the waves wake up a little music in my mind-sky

  like a wish fell out your lips as elegantly precise

  and mysterious as a rain drop or some terrific

  shivering tear that finds the wet of the water that

  reflects my love like a painting of the stars by a

  dream scientist trying to unwrap the secrets of

  those shimmer sounds as they whisper their mystery

  when we touch as the lights go out and the world

  is quietly full of breathless swimming and the dance

  becomes a current that takes us under the surface of

  songs

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  i’ve long watched your curve of a body lay

  tenderly out over the world like a water resting

  on the sky and something so achingly familiar

  hides on the flesh of your thigh, like the prettiest

  puddles of eden were to open up like a new

  blue, making clouds hover so white like warm

  cotton resembling snow were to slide me into

  your body like a dream undone by this true

  dancing that makes wishes come together and

  the empties fall apart where some wonderful bird

  meets a flower and the nectar sings for serendipity’s

  rainbow

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  you are a pleasantness hand holding

  my heart with your fingers, pressing like an

  awareness bird were resting in your palm

  like a flower were blooming inside your kiss

  where fingertips dance whispers on the meaning

  of lips that speak in whistles wet with reaching,

  stretching into songs of snow

  and there is warmth where the blood meets

  the skin and your skin meets my skin and

  there happens a wash of remembering where

  the years hold handfuls of delightful delusions

  called dreams waiting to be let open for a fly

  away

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  what is it about your knees that wake up the

  tendrils and wisps that grow from vibrations

  of old spring whispers of the rain that pour

  inside this chest breathing bird whistles and

  waiting for the sun to open up those legs for

  a stroll into stuttering silences of something so

  unceremonious as my head resting on your chest,

  the smell of the rain like a secret sleeping on your

  breast,

  and the sounds left behind by our sacred

  sputtering makes us ever more conscious of clouds,

  our heads singsonging in the bellies of butterflies

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  Personal Acknowledgements

  There are a few people without whom this book, and most, if not all, of the poems within it would not exist.

  I would like to give special thanks to the following for their immeasurable influence and inspiration: A. Scott Britton, Nelson Heise, Megan Lightell, John Miller, Joe Riddlebarger, Scott Rinehart, Alta Sims, and Peter Trier.

  Their fingerprints are found somewhere on all of the poems in this collection.

  I would like to thank my children, Caroline and Alex, for op
ening my eyes to a new way of seeing almost everything, like seeing the world again for the first time.

  Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Sarah, who has given me permission to be a poet unapologetically. It can be a difficult life to live with a poet, but she makes it seem effortless. Sarah is, and will always be, my most elusive muse. I look forward to a lifetime of trying to capture all that she will inspire within me.

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