by Paul Hina
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