Greenhouses, Lighthouses
Copper Canyon Press, 2013
“In this tightly crafted work, prose poems about the lighthouse's desolation—in sections called "Invisible Green," recalling water "so dark it is mistaken for black"—alternate with poems about being in the thick of things ("the days/ thick with the texture of cream or wax"). Sexual intimacy, unaccounted violence, grapes "souring/ to wine"—all vivify this third collection from Avery Hopwood/ Eisner Literary Award winner Hu.”
Library Journal
from Invisible Green
In 1800, Thomas Griffiths, a keeper stationed on the lighthouse, died by accident. Unable to flag down a passing ship, the other keeper, Thomas Howell, worried he would be blamed for Griffiths’s death. Accordingly, he constructed a coffin from the wooden bulkhead of the living room and lashed it with rope to the outside of the gallery wall. With the passing ships noticing nothing wrong with the light, it was three months before he was relieved. As a result of the trauma Howell experienced while living with a corpse, British lighthouses have had three keepers stationed on them, a strict rule kept until automation in the 1980s.
Though Griffiths was real, his death continues to be told and retold until it becomes fiction, with each teller lingering over each gory detail: the coffin bursting open to reveal a partially decomposed arm waving in the wind; the bottle of rum that may have lured Griffiths to his lethal tumble over a metal railing; the arguments between Thomases younger and older in the public houses of Solva; the hair white with fright when Howell was finally relieved and sent to the madhouse. But these stories are ways of giving a frisson not unlike that of dipping one’s toe in cold water for a few seconds. In each story, there is always a beginning, middle, and end.
What is untellable is a sense of time that is monochrome in color: the flatness of the sky, the small rain that is starting but not yet rising to the level of a gale, the wind that opens onto more wind. Woodcocks, larks, starlings, and blackbirds. The pools left behind in the rock in a spring midafternoon, when tides are at their lowest. A sense that one’s vision is being tested when looking at the sea’s edges. On the horizon, ship and bird and fish and the idea of north are as interchangeable as the soft forms on the bottom of the optometrist’s chart. Difficult as it is to look at the horizon for long periods of time, a determined looker can catch that moment of pure chance known as a green flash. Shot/reverse shot: around sunset, for a fraction of a green second, the horizon looks back.
Read the rest of “Invisible Green” at Michigan Quarterly Review
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Exposure
Let the blue flower shatter over the medians and I want to draw in the blanks
of your back the moon crescents you can’t see and feed you nightshade
or at least eggplants when you are too much in the days, dear, tell medoes daylight corrode your voice or coat everything it touches, lakes,
rivers, white nerves? Then I will tie an oxbow out of your wide meander and
walk down the mission road ringing copper bells when no cars canhear. We kiss only in black and white since they discontinued
Kodachrome. Have you noticed there is too much sun now:
owing to glass ceilings and the increased saving of daylight timethere is not enough darkness between eye blinks to separate out
the park from its memory, so just say when and I’ll start writing
histories of how we met in the playground, how you pushed me downand asked if I would help you back up. Of the first movie, of covering
your eyes during it, of the first words we spoke, and how few words
we knew because they still lodged in the world, and not yet in us. -
Corrections
Newark, New Jersey, is not America’s renaissance
city, as I wrote previously; that is Pittsburgh.
Newark is dying and has a bleak future.
A recent poem implies that I am lonely.
I am not; my mouth is just shaped that way,
small and sad-looking. And due to an editing error,
our dog is listed as our pack leader. This is a mistake;
our leader is the president, who governs
with the consent of the people. But if even people
are mistaken? Then I believe in amnesty.
Each side to marry their enemy, ghosts to live
peacefully among us like months waiting
to turn thick and flush with moisture. Calendar
and chronicle annulled. Unlink names from
their dead and return names to where they
may be changed and forgotten and used again.
And faces? Faces, too. Let the oceans be milk-white
with the accumulated light of old photographs.