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Sarah Hina


Boy


​They pulled you out between White’s Mill and Currier Street,
about a mile from the bridge where you parked.
 
The river is warmer
than it was in March
when everyone was looking
and putting up signs
and later on, looking
less, checking on Facebook
to report what your mom
said, connecting the dots
to fashion a lede.
 
You were “Missing Athens Man.”
Knives in the wood
after a knife-throwing act.
A stain of old pain
in the rearview reflection.
How come we hadn’t
learned the lesson?
 
You left your keys in the ignition.
 
There was goodness there. In the swell.
Everyone shouldering hope and doubt
on competing scales.
It seemed the proof you were looking for:
if life has worth, people will fight for it;
if people fight, living is worth it.
It made sense, on its face.
 
You had a great smile.
I could see your mother’s hope in it.
You wore your hair long
and it made you look vulnerable.
You probably would have hated this,
but “sweet” is the word that springs to mind.
 
This world is hard on the gentle boys.
 
And I keep trying to recall if the
pizza delivery guy had long hair
or short, the week before Christmas
we got pizza at work.
 
Why should I want to put you there?
What could it possibly matter?
 
Your mother said she’d come for you.
Just hang tighter.

Once the weather turned,
I ran the section of the bike path
that bends to the river
forward and back and forward again,
pacing myself to its muted rhythm.
Its crooked spine, infrequent joggers.
The birds were sharp—soft—all together,

both at once. The wind in the grass
​was a woman’s dress, a mouthful of milk
on a taut clothesline.

Shine Shine Shine

Fog on the hillside
and running through my lungs
 
The sun spokes through
the wings of a sparrow
   
as it beats a bright path
across the field 
                 
spilled open with dew-dappled
spiderwebs
like a pirate deciding
his treasure
was ours
 
 
Shine shine shine 
 
Later, a red leaf
takes off on a lark
and gambols downriver
 
and I am the only one
wise to its stumble,
its easeful incision
into a current
 
peopled by pond skaters
saving their best dance
for light
 
 
A fawn
pokes its nose
through the brush
alongside me
 
to look,
with alarm
 
and--
curiosity
​

Jammed

I never know where
a line break should fall
 
or how to split my team
into squads.
 
I'd make a lousy coach,
I wager;
 
I'd have made a worser
surgeon.
 
The tension comes
from competing draws:
 
a desire to hem water
like the lake would
 
and the instinct to fray,
flow, stop and
fake, and en-
jamb it like a river
does. 
​

telegram

after the Christmas lights
and before the thaw
 
   a secret kiss
 
betwixt
mistletoe
and snowflake
 
two cardinals
weaving romance
 
   in dots and dashes
 
great staccato leaps
of burbling gossip
 
on a white parchment day
in the middle of a fairyland
 
   I transcribe them faithfully
 
including an incredible bit
at the end
with a berry
​

Inflation

Our religion is awe
but our practice is flawed,
 
too busy counting the tasks
before us
 
to contemplate the quanta
of astonishments we breathe.
 
To wit: the universe's expansion has been
in action for 13.8 billion years
 
but that fact is nothing compared to this:
it's not letting up, but getting faster.
 
And I have known you
this many years.
 
And my love keeps
growing, growing
 
even as time so softly chimes:
you will never catch me. 

Tintinnabulation

We had bells in our mouths
back then
we did
 
and every word
was a clang to the ribs
 
and every conversation
with you
a wedding
 
Where the brides
wore laughter
 
and the grooms
were clappers
 
and every guest 
inside a mile
smiled
 
Because bells
are contagious
 
And so were we
​
Picture


​Sarah Hina's profile

My son plays baseball on the fields nearby.

​But you were a rustle
in the thirsty brush,
drawing my thoughts as my
feet held the line
because I saw the men huddled
across the bank--
sonar trawling, sirens off.
 
The water flashing
its teeth
in the sun.
 
There and back,
I took the bridge,
culling the edges with my eyes,
reading the gaps between the lines,
seeing the eddies bubble and
froth, disturbed by the dead limbs,
big rocks, uprooted trunks.
 
Trespassing on something
that wasn’t mine.
 
Even now, not sure
what I’m doing here.
 
But you see how absence becomes abyss
and you think, God, how do they carry this?
I absorbed you. Not impulsively, not all at once,
but incrementally, with the herd.
We swallowed you in desperate sips.
You sank in, like tea, leaving leaves at the end.
An archetype with a shape
pulled from the caves. 
The lost son. Come back.
Your brother has killed the fattened calf.
For you. Come back.
Won’t you hear?
 
And now
I want to take your picture
down, so that she won’t have to.
 
I want to hug my children tighter,
preserving their shape in a better forever.
 
We never learn.
It never makes sense.
You needed more time.
Pain is a bridge.
 
The paper said
you left a poem behind. 
 
It’s April now. Winter was hard.
 
The lilac is late this year.

When to Where

When I die
let it happen outside
in the arms of
a faithless Spring 
 
Let the light go out
near water and trees;
let someone say after, 
“Her eyes were open” 
 
Let the driftwood drift;
let the fish go blurp;
let the vulture circle
an infinite earth 
 
Let my breath be swept
by the next stiff breeze;  
let a million leaves
all shuffle the deck
       
Let the sky stay blue
as my face falls slack; 
let the sun roll off
the tip of my tongue 
 
Where over the chasm, 
and without a pause,
the insects will strum
some summer hymn
and the birds will raise
their voice to a head,
crowning--
 
Yes!
 
Yes!
 
The song plays on
​

Elevation

The church bells rang
and the cardinals flew
 
An altar of blood 
keeping the two
 
Safe across the 
city's walls
 
Until their final 
dying fall.
 
When later, the violin 
player starts 
 
and fails
to make a woman
 
from gut and hair,
of air and longing
 
but I'll give him points
for trying.
 
For Love,
what is deeper
 
than Death
but You? 
 
And how weak the word
that wants Your flesh
 
but bends before
such broken bread.
​

And the Record Slipped

​Intimacy lives
in that band 
of skin
 
above a man's
collar
 
beneath the
draw of his
barber's blade
   
Where Summer's
burn slides
 
into its white
Winter bed
 
And in the passage,
a woman's Fall
​

Dave

I want to be like
Michelangelo--
 
I want to see David
in a block of ocean
 
and carve until
I set him free.
 
But we can't all be
Renaissance idols
 
and sometimes a poem
is just a guy named Dave.
 
Naked Dave, on a naked beach,
affecting an air of bonhomie
 
for the seagulls, crabs and jellyfish
per some new-age philosophy--
 
carrying his whole dear self,
in lieu of a sling.

Passings

I saw an albino fawn
outside the window on    
the day you passed
and it saw me 
I thought
 
Before I turned
to take your hand
and say my last 
goodbye
 
Your hand was smooth
and broad 
and white 
beneath my own 
 
like wood 
stripped free 
of bark

​
​     
❦
​

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