Between Yonder and You: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2017-2020

By Paul Hina

Between Yonder and You is Paul Hina's fifth installment in his continuing Collected Love Poems series. In his follow-up to 2017's Music Only We Know, Hina uses his unique, impressionistic voice to take the reader on his journey to harness the whimsy, joy and frustration of man's desire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Hina
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005846404

Paul Hina

Paul Hina is the author of eight novels including Imeros, Let it Snow, and Double Play. His eighth novel, The Other Shore, was released in March 2016 with the story From the Boathouse in a single volume, The Other Shore: Two Stories of Love and Death. The Lavender Haze: Three Stories of Flirting with an Affair is his most recent release and includes three new stories. Hina has also published four collections of poetry including Such Deliberate Loveliness, Of Wanting and Rain, Origami Moonlight and Music Only We Know. Paul currently lives in Athens, Ohio with his wife, Sarah, and their two children.

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Between Yonder and You: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2017-2020

Paul Hina

Published by Paul Hina at Smashwords

Copyright ©2021 by Paul Hina

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Between Yonder and You: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2017-2020

Table of Contents

2017 Poems

2018 Poems

2019 Poems

2020 Poems

2017 Poems

1

she pulls me through the fog of autumn

and drags me through these first jagged

weeks of winter—the coldest this America

has ever known,

and she breathes on me with the sweet

smell of hope written on her breath, a tickle

that belies a future full of clumsies and scaries

that we must learn together,

and even in our tightest, warmest embrace,

we will absorb the many travesties and humiliations

of these years with as much grace as this national

ugliness will allow,

and as her hair falls from her shoulders and

traipses over my face with the fingers of all the

careless angels to come, there is a warmth and a

faith in all her kisses that keep the hum of our private

happinesses steady even as the rest of the country

gets swallowed behind an orange curtain concealing

a world covered in the cruelest ice and snow of a deep,

long winter that will eventually, someday, end

2

the evidence of her is in the white of my

winter breath, the shape of her is floating

off on that chilly vapor like a ghost over

this snowy world, encircling me with kisses

and memories of spring's perfume,

but it goes as quickly as it came—a shot of

fog that curves into her and then curls away

into the cold,

but then it comes again, a new breath, and

another, and with each new exhale the taste

of her lips comes tantalizingly close, the heat

of her breath almost reaches my rosy cheek…

only for a moment before a quick rush of heartbreak

falls,

but it's worth every ache that follows the cold,

chases the white, like almost seeing your bride

behind the veil for the first time

3

—she's my guiding principle—

when her face is framed by morning sunshine,

i draw a horizon line that stretches from her

nose to her hip, and there are dips and

dives along the way where i fall loopy in

love again and rise to where my pulse

seems to derive

—she's the rhythm of my world—

and when i close my eyes on deep breath

days, my mind flips through her many leaves

of loveliness, the shards of ecstatic cast-offs

she casually scatters by merely being the

woman she is, like the day she calmed the

skirt of her dress from the wind with her steady

hands, and i dissolved, dizzy with effervescence

and desire

—she's my true north—

and when she smiles that smile that dances

over her face—demure yet knowing, like spring

light squirming on water—and parts a curtain

of lashes to show a world so blue that i lose

all other light in the flood and watch as stars

skate around her heavenly body and point me

home to those warmest lips

—she's the map to where heaven hides—

and when she moves her body like she forgot

herself, or laughs at the little things, or softly

pushes her hair from her face, it feels like she's

asking me to waltz in the rain under a roof

made by the domes of those same smiling

skies of blue-grey eyes, and i'd follow her there

as i'd follow her anywhere

4

the space she owns in my mind is a city

so busy, with a river down the center that

reflects our time like a movie on a loop,

and all the residents spend their evening

peopling the bridges from one side of my

mind to the other—decorated with all their

pleasures hung from all their hopes—and

watch all our kisses and caresses,

but it's not voyeurism as much as it is a

snowstorm in the heart, the kind you watch

from inside a warm home as the world moves

in slow motion and the magic of our lives

suddenly—for a moment—makes a perfect,

unrelenting sense, like a river to a sea, or

my finger gliding over your jaw, a shiver to

a kiss-bitten lip

5

her hot breath pushes against my face,

melts a kiss like snow over flesh—tastes

of desire and rain—

and she climbs my body, wraps her thighs

around my waist,

her heart pounds against mine, syncs with

my pounding heart,

and i push her skirt higher and higher with

hungry hands until i touch that naked hip,

and we fall on to spring's floor of grass

and bury ourselves under the weight of

each other's earth until we're so deep in

the dirt that we crest into tornadoes and

pierce the skin of the sky,

and when we enter this atmospheric freefall,

we steal the shine off the stars, paint the petals

of all the unborn flowers with the color and

the pulse of an exhumed passion so warm

and full of light that life forever unwinds into

a creation never-ending, spinning off into

pastel mandalas of passion's delights

6

i could use a visit from you, to know

the scent of you washing over me again,

or just to dream about you, seeing your hair

fall over your shoulder like some subconscious

baptism,

or just a glimpse of the way your dress sways

when you walk, inspiring imagination shapes

of other yous from the endless hidden forms

you've made in me with the glee of the lightheaded

rush that always follows behind you,

i could use your words, the simple sound of your

voice like warm waters to soak this aching heart,

and the heat of your breath to swim in like a song

so familiar that it might as well be a time machine

to our first kiss—

oh, dreary, dreary days, i could use some first

kisses, but i'd settle for the last one all over again,

an eternal return, an endless loop between ecstasy

and heartbreak, bliss and devastation

7

her long body is rapturous and white,

bathed in nothing but sunlight, a glow

of gold breathing from her skin like a

slip of