Brandon Shimoda: from O BON, a note & a poem

[He comments]: O Bon was written in Montana, Virginia and Washington, 2005-2007. I had originally set myself the task of thinking about my grandfather—my father’s father, Midori Shimoda, a photographer—and simply that: thinking about him, his life. That alone seemed right, and more than enough to make it so. Born in Hiroshima in 1910, my grandfather immigrated to the United Statesat age nine, alone, in 1919. Imprisoned in a federal detention center in Missoula, Montana, during the Second World War, he did not become a citizen of the United Statesuntil 1955. He passed away in North Carolina, in September of 1996. A month after his death, and a month before his ashes were scattered in Death Valley, my grandfather visited me. It was morning—I was alone in the house I grew up in. My grandfather’s appearance was immediately preceded by a thunderclap and a surge of total light. He appeared before me fully corporeal—“not a ghost / but a man of ash without speech.” He did not speak, though I took his visit to be an order of stewardship over his life. I did not mean to resurrect him, though after many years of failed attempts, I began to visit in return. 

The Inland Sea 

An ovary held between white grasses

drinks praise from attentive

blooms along hard, dated

ground      a single life’s 

length below

I slip into atomy

my family walked into      the river uneven

curtain stretched from the wood—

__________ 

feet swelling with dead

weight splintered lamps

arousing cold

water ankles drawn by river grass 

their legs (their shins, wool

knees wiring thighs  

their hands (their fingers

curling fingertips, nails, the moss beneath

their fingernails 

ash in the folds of their knuckles

palms stitched with divinatory lines, the braid of their wrists

arms slack to their hips 

chests (flowering

lungs their upper arms, the current

rinsing the skin on  

shoulders

marbling

chins

lips varicose

solvencies flooding

the brain with every opening 

to speak

in calling each

other close 

ears

lopped 

upon stone

noses 

collapsed

the redolent lance

of eucalyptus— 

There was a time      the trees were young and supportive 

eyes

with cataracts 

lashes coil

round eyeless veins 

horizon

stretching      thin 

where

foreheads

spore 

the banks hair

fanning 

water bulbs

root smoke veiling 

shore 

stones 

      where

are their heads      what

may I rest my head      my hands

upon      of them                  

The guards found me wrapped

in a bladder

seized with the enormity of flesh

spoiling

blockbuster of faces

destroyed

in the making of all I was hungry

animal dumb to its labors

The tastelessness of flesh

upon a ravaged tongue the taste

of flesh to an eroding brain

buds on a ravaged tongue 

the removal of the tongue 

A waxen rose

intemperance of red 

overhead

weather planes angling through contrails

double droning a negative sky

__________

Inside of the nucleus of the Atomium

every surface is

a mirror I see my family in

though I never learned any of their names

for fear they would have changed my course

my shadow

             wake

the disembodied

White umbrellas gaining earth

__________

Grow open my mouth 

that I speak as I speak

a sea forms

the sky permitting itself

                                      inside

at once

            of me, and out—             

a procession of waves

drawing piles of stone, piles of stone 

[editor’s note.  The excerpts here are from O Bon (Litmus Press, Brooklyn, NY), one of two remarkable books by Brandon Shimoda published in 2011.  The other  book is The Girl Without Arms (BlackOcean, Boston, MA).  Writes Tomaz Salamun: “Brandon Shimoda seems to be an Ur-being, a totally new creature: And I never wanted children, but now / I want children / To drop / Through skeletal netting / Nameless / Into black beds / As like unto potters aglow in generous helpings of children. We, standing by, reading, shivering in awe, are stopped.  Mute, then refreshed and launched.  His children.”]