(scroll down for Brandon Shimoda Prose)
A man I am not allowed to like walked into my booth. He had the top half of an intake manifold in his hand. He doesn’t know who I am or why I am not allowed to like him. I forget what he sells in his booth, but what’s important is that it doesn’t operate here at our Sunday flea market, but at the cursed Saturday swapmeets.
I sat on the couch in the back. He gave me a squinted, short smile when he entered. He didn’t notice my keen observation of him—not then, or when the boys and I had spied on him and the other Swappers the weeks before.
He was an old goat moving through the booth. Peppered grey hair stuck out from his head in tufts. He clanked around, bouncing and twitching off the boxes and crates and stands. When certain things caught his attention, he gave them a slower, longer sniff (one of the cassettes, a clay bunny sculpture made by Joëlle Gervais).
He spent a considerable amount of time at the bookshelves, craning his long neck into the case and running his finger along the shelf’s edge. I could hear his breath do short little ticks as he read the different titles.
Working his way deeper into the booth, he stopped at a box of short prose just to my right. Placing the intake manifold down at his feet, he started picking through the loose papers. I watched him rifling through them and saw hands guilty of many dinner table spills. When he reached a particular set of pages, his fingers calmed. His eyes blinked long as he read carefully. Then his lips cracked open, forming a mail slot hole. His top lip quivered slightly as the words worked through him. I stopped watching him.
“I’ll take these,” he said while holding the papers up to me after another minute or so had gone by.
I stood up and took them from his hand. A couple of poems by Brandon Shimoda looked back at me.
I pointed down to his feet. ”What’s the intake for?”
”Ah, it’s for my 2003 Toyota Avalon. I’m trying to convince myself mine is warped and that the headgasket isn’t blown.”
I didn’t know where they sold intake manifolds within the flea market. But I did know the evasive blown-headgasket-dance.
After I handed the papers back, he bent down and picked up the intake. He held it against his hip, letting the weight of it crumple the poems still in his hand. He gave a quick lift of the hand before turning and leaving.
The Selected Poems:
Hinotama
by Brandon Shimoda
There is a simpler, more pristine life
inside the ball of light
bouncing above the barbed wire fence
A small incision made
in space
through which an entirely new fashion
of human being
is spying
on the people incarcerees,
we are supposed to call them,
that is the signal
of their expendability
motivating the whirling blades the wave-like crests
as the striving of a human
to separate
the calcified tumor
that makes the ball
a planet fallen
to ice
a simpler, more pristine life
pressing against the startled faces
rooting, together,
to describe the ephemeral achievement
of collective entrapment
the loss that is constant, rapid
The Pond Museum
by Brandon Shimoda
The fenestrate surface of the pond
surfaces in old companions snag ripples
namely, Saburo
I recommend his face for the pond museum
above the fox’s skulking face
the hare’s face, death’s polished stone
the crane’s larval pearl
eyes transmitting the code for a sodden voice
in the splintering reeds
And when I say I recommend
I mean the menagerie in the utmost dark
saviors hung from supping trees
gone the way of idiot flesh—where you
were endowed with a chance, and fucked up
Evening, I went down
on the pantry, pried open
a basket of rice cakes, grew
partial to eating in the dark
if only to concentrate the sound
of walking through the wilderness
at night, enlarged
without people
as wax I sleep in nectar
When was the flora brass
A woman kneeling among cranes
Willows waiting
for sticks to arrive
to burn cranes from her body
genital
wind through which
No, it has always been this way
blooms erupting
suspicion, husband
making sure each dawn
the sticks stay lashed to his back, the wood
she waits for
thin as blades, and cut as close
To fallow soil
sea dragon in hand
proper, yes, though petrified
crimson, pink, indigo, green
purple and yellow lotus
cradle in the hedgerow
I feel
faint exceptionally
hot here on the ground
Should I be sweating this much?
Should the sea dragon weigh so heavily?
Bronze skin festooning the trees
cutting a spirit loose?
Carrion flowers
slip
from my hand