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. And 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 milkwhite
with the accumulated light of old photographs.
from SPLITTING
You told me they are the leftovers of memory: the bas-reliefs that took a century to carve, when people still believed in slowness. When walking west to east, each foot is an hour of time, and each toe is a minute. And a few hundred miles over to the state line is a life. I am leaving you for the airport, a leaving we practiced almost every month, and it was just that—practice. The elevated train rocks back and forth in the morning light. Below the roofs of houses communicate secretly with the heavens, with laundry lines, carrier pigeons, and radio antennas. The body has meridians and channels of energy too, our bodies expanding outwards by touching, the slowest way to reach the world, bending towards each animal, feeling oneself doubling, splitting.
Excerpts from Tung-Hui Hu, Greenhouses, Lighthouses (forthcoming).