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Brandon Shimoda

In the annals of the Great Restlessness, Brandon Shimoda traces characters of a turbulent disquiet: these ruptured silences sound expanses and pour out insomniac rains. The rains are fumes or phantoms, diffusing poisons. There is no purity in this dreaming, a haunting that caresses the body’s boundaries, that retains both temperament and appetite.
       In their casting, open lines, the poems gesture to states and violations beyond their porous frames. Sleep exceeds the giant, as the thread its spindle, and the harm which hovers in the trees, staining intimacies. The world's incursions, tender and lewd—see how often it licks or laps its consumable inhabitants. Disquiet disfigures the person—human presence for Shimoda involves blurrings of gender and species, rapacity and sickness its fundamental terms. The gaze tainted and tainting, “Behind the hollow where eyes / Coil yellow snakes implacable.”
       Historical violence inscribes a transgressive energy on the lyric, song the dissonant echo of “Gummy, embryonic skulls / And bomb shadows.” How to endure, how to bear, how to dream, how to rest in a “great and dying house suffused with a colicky light?” How to take nurture from an earth marked by despoliation and erasure, “No bodies to replant what were arguably seeds”? How to sleep without portent? Shimoda’s answers are the restless improvisations of response, the longing, hungering tongue of will and touch, disruption’s volatile material in lucid launchings: “A small horse ascending iron clouds is a fragile gas / Rippling the face of instructive evening.”

—Karen Volkman

Disquiet



for Molly McDonald


Walking out to the water

Is more than walking to an ocean of repetitive pardon

A receptive sky bending to lick a school of lavender

Stonecrop necks in the cold of a lone

Inversion, the enormity

Wihin walking

Together—it is not romantic

And herein lies the problem

With water and rocks

Magnanimous sky when the islands sink

A burning dirge, and thinking about

Oceanic rocks

Cloud tongue wetting the school of ice plants

Mute water and moss and tight water and rocks

Lapping the bones through the skin



Beams of color broken in two

Ocher and a precipitous garden

Your mind keeps literally afloat

A map as an instrument of the sun

Inside your poems your mouth

Withdraws a path of calendars wild

Overbearing the water

Until the shutters fall off the imploded house

Cliff-edge until your brain fans out

Fivefold. How will you write otherwise?

Mussels salivating little bridges in clapping

Forms loose in unaccompanied dawn?

How could you sleep as one and one?

With a seat thrust out of the rock

At the sea

You will always be held to the exilic grain

Sweeping the caps in their patterns of white

Is my problem, I know. You have only begun—

Disquiet



Seven satellites of the moon

Alight into our neighborhood

Lick the steeples from balls to prayer

Upon the shanty dwelling



Intentions of dwellings to buildings are buildings for fires

Neighbors slink thirstily to



You love them you clear blankets for them

Fill the space with grapes and massage

Fancy the reverent bobbing wish the consecratory light of

    the cross



Seven satellites circle Niagara

Men planted women wearing the lot of their plants skinned

    children

Around their waists, Goodbye, Goodbye

To indigenous facts

Squash blossoms fallen to the floor

I.e. punishment sublimated into employ blossoms make

    welcoming slaughter



Several bleaches in the aerial shots of you and me

Wedged into the voluminous gears of the grocery

A small horse ascending iron clouds is a fragile gas

Rippling the face of instructive evening

Sit down it is early come on there is nothing to see



Late at night I wake up I stand before the leaded glass the

    ironing board

Upon which plants have been judiciously arranged

I touch the wantering Jew I touch teh jade I touch

The great and dying house suffused with a colicky light

The shades of disquiet look back at you flat in the sheets

Protect me, Depend on me moon damp apostrophe

A Giant Asleep in Fortune's Spindle


A nest of titanium and lead

Would surely



Feel a small girl in wind in

The basket she carries a rocket

More important than the sun

Forms before combustion waves off her rushed mantis legs

Held properly, yet harm

Springs from a doppelgänger in the trees

Where there are not



But hanging selves

The perfect self does a life’s–worth less



Pushing creation

From a perfect mask

Carrying means and I feel halved







Behind the hollow where eyes

Coil yellow snakes implacable

Landscape objects to a settled stare because



Like pregnant strides through lumber

Inauguration of mist betwixt scenes composed of kill

Forms of furthest land in back the manumit—







Tumbling a small girl a small room

Swamp mauled fruit

Take this body from its hood I do—