Case in point: the giantly-statured Peace Statue of Nagasaki’s Peace Park comes under the memoir’s scrutiny, what with the sculpture’s “mute, immobile, not human” disposition seeming more an enshrinement of the atomic bomb than its victims. Ditto for the way Shimoda’s scrupulous eye is later aimed at the “unclear” World Trade Center national memorial. The contraption of recollection inspired by the most imagination-snagging recent disaster to transpire upon U.S. soil sports mechanized water flowing snake- and smoke-like across walls and down into holes. Yet despite the hastily-canonized mid-empire memorial’s capacity to produce an ever-ready “overabundance of dispassionate eyes,” the setting remains “too conceptual to satisfy the patriotism stirred by—and maintained since—September 11, 2001.” And meanwhile mere blocks from the twin towers’ former abode there stands lower Manhattan’s largely-infrequented African Burial Ground National Monument. A memorial to a largely built-over cemetery itself allocated 300-plus-some years ago for the often involuntarily-relocated members of the African diaspora inhabiting early New York City, the African Burial Ground seems so overwhelmed by the fortifications of the selfsame forces of Capital that once upon a time fueled the Atlantic slave trade, “the form of the surrounding buildings with their thousands of windows” behind which loom “the people who manufacture the blood of their businesses” as to appear “fugitive, because it feels like you are being surveilled, tabulated.”
As The Grave on The Wall accumulatively diffuses, shrine beyond shrine, history-corralling-history, the insufficiencies of civic memory congeal and overlap with the span and inconspicuous spin of the strata comprising the sun-orbiting earth. The terrain of bygone truth is a byway of loss-echeloned voice. So it makes a kind of cosmic sense that the narrator duly comes to imagine, with apt geological logic, the uppermost aspect of the earth itself serving as a ready medium by which to amplify mortality’s centrality:
If we marked every death—not even yet a grave—with a mound, the earth would be covered in mounds. The mounds would act as impassive prophecy, to which the living grow accustomed, in understanding their bodies, their destinies, death, in general, as being part of the evolving topography of earth.
In this way, at least, the history of breath would achieve some less incommensurate equilibrium with the history of the planet. The solution at hand is not fanciful so much as lucidly drastic. Aggregate, urgent. Aggressively non-transient. The structures necessary for a truer (see: calamity- precluding) attunement with the past simply seem beyond current imaginative capacities. Yet if the cooly relentless laments for the failures of communal memory in The Grave on The Wall—itself the first non-poem-predominating book in Brandon Shimoda’s opus—are in no small part the fruit of Shimoda’s unusually hyper-un-myopic sense of scale, such scale is a constant in his oeuvre.
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The space of Shimoda’s 2011 poetry collection O Bon (Litmus Press) is a calamitously verdant space of “celebration/ incised/ onto terracing air” (“Through the Ghost Fires.”) If the overriding structural orientation of our epoch is so operatively brutal as to erase memory and make a self-serving staircase of the very earth, O Bon flutters up and down the smug rungs of the all-pervasive underworld at the incantatory expense of the chaos.
The milieu of the poems of O Bon is such that “A lady inside/ a translucent turnip” and “Beets and radishes chirping” both alike cohabitate with “gummy, embryonic skulls/ and bomb shadows” (“Lake M”). Ends of things seem so inextricably tied to beginnings as to render the formalities of modern civic memorials intrinsically aloof, almost snobbish. “The tastelessness of flesh” rests “upon a ravaged tongue” whereon also sits “the taste/ of flesh to an eroding brain” which at once “buds on a ravaged tongue” (“The Inland Sea”). And while nuclear weapons and their fallout are persistently referenced yet never quite granted definitive procreant credit, the all-but-end-stop-less poems of O Bon would reverse history’s horrid course and allow the now “darkened shore” onto which our ocean-ancestors once upon a time migrated to serve as a stage where “ribbon integuments freshen/ into antiquity” (“Crucian Carp”).
In the face of all the ritual-amidst-chaos, O Bon’s cooly drastic honorific correctives seem ideally embodied by one particular character: the former-priest-turned-cannibal- narrator of “The Corpse Eater.” Amidst teasingly tactile ruins and strontium-suffused strata, The Corpse Eater’s supra-sonic orientation represents indeed the very opposite of capitulation. “Plunging the opened body/ eloping/ in fallout/ between tree between tree,” the narrator consummates a full-bodied fling with fatality in the middle of valleys whose regenerative expansiveness “bruises the raining of ears/ becoming foliage.” The transposed torque of mid-madness life is in fact such that “the dead waste dead return.” The tongue waves and flutters, as if the instrument of speech is here merely the teeth’s deputy. “I hear you tell/ I want to hear you tell,” The Corpse eater nonetheless sings with cumulative sensorial attunement, in response to the soil-broaching vivacity of the supposedly posthumous:
beneath flapping roots the will to part
the ground to say
I hear you tell
I want to hear you tell
mandibles masting
your throat
in slats
Bonding the extant with the extinct, The Corpse Eater’s embrace of loss builds new byways between speech and the unspeakable. “I flay the form for your return,” The Corpse Eater ensures, righteously hastening existential cycles. And the bridge between breath and non-breath becomes so mellifluously navigable as to cascade down the page with the capsized sacramentality of the flags at the poem’s beginning descending—like a kind of anticipatory corrective of the snake-like national memorial water flowing lamentably aloofly through The Grave on The Wall ’s very framework—into oblivious corpuses of liquid.— — — — —
As intrinsically remote from would-be encapsulating scrutiny as canonical modern memorials are from the full-bodied labor of genuine memory—such might be an accurate summation of Brandon Shimoda’s post-O Bon books of poetry. Each of these collections simply cultivates its own unfailingly uncompromising sort of over-archingly elusive ritual space. The Girl Without Arms (2011, Black Ocean) is a sprawling end-stop-less collection of such reverberating sensorial twirl and pace as to render its narrator a kind of self-sieving deity, spying the venerable everywhere yet never not shirking subsuming fealties. Chaos preponderates, “THE AIR THAT STUNS PREDICTS,” and yet reason and vision—and perhaps most essentially, memory—remain salvageable enough to birth the desire that “we have to do something/ We have to refuse to suffer an ending.” Portuguese (2014, Octopus Books) exudes the intimately hyper-sociable luminosity of a kind of self-effacing jubilee. “When stuffing slipper into your mouths,” one of the many poems titled “For The People” instructs with the kind of casual cosmic bent indicative of a more general galactic bearing, “Beware of what makes you extraterrestrial.” The words of Evening Oracle (2015, Letter Machine Editions) oft-appear to be operating at the very frontiers of their inherent materiality. Even fuzziness is immense. Accents and registers cooly cohabitate as if ceremonially. “One dreams of living above a bathhouse/ In a snow-covered field/ With a procession of white animals/ Passing nightly (‘Tsurunoyu’).” Immensities themselves become fuzzy. And the overt-ness of Evening Oracle‘s polyphony—certainly present in Shimoda’s previous collections, but here bloomed into a novelly voluminous stratigraphy—seems to birth a fluidity of utterance all the more sonically singular for being operatively suspicious of self-limiting singularity.
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Then in time there is a refrain-like recourse to a landscape of illuminating extremity. At once robust and free, rigorous yet airy, The Desert (2018, Song Cave) exhibits an uncommonly rangey formal fluidity. Continuing in Evening Oracle’s spirit of nature-mimicking miscellany, The Desert treats us not only to poems but also journal entries, diffusively-unnamed sectioned-lyrics, email excerpts, and even photographical-hints of the kind that later serve The Grave on The Wall so vibrantly.
Á la Shimoda’s first collection The Alps (2008, Flim Forum), the geological cadences of The Desert are punchily diffuse in a way that seems functionally aware of the perils of formal intricacy:
There are the mountains, I see them
From town, the mountains are magnificent
Federal Bureau of Investigation, et cetera
Enormous the mountains are golden and black
When we go to the mountains, town becomes pathetic
But we miss it, we want to get back to the lights
We miss them, the lights being thrown momentarily
From far away (“Mountains”)
As is evident even above, the rarified separateness of The Desert renders the brutal facts of surveillance and incarceration (and the imperialist State’s manipulation of bodies more generally) all the more lucid in relief. “The desert,” one journal entry realizes, “is the landscape of coordinated disappearance.” Registers (vocal, social, even mineral) are all the while aggregating. Disparate timbres click into sonic communality damn near sedimentarily. And if the desert is indeed so commodious as to intrinsically hide away its endlessness-tending inventory, it’s also true that The Desert at hand is a habitat of overriding confinement, custody, trauma, abuse, raw hunger, and blindness (willed or involuntary).As if by historical mandate, the lyric diversity of The Desert wires and weirds its very silences into something self-escapingly jittery. “Perpetual rejection [‘Incarceration’] is comfort.” A keenness bred of restlessness becomes something of an ideal in the face of late-empire reality. Yet precisely because The Desert so assuredly self-niches in an ecologically extreme (see: historically appropriate) setting, the book’s radar for breath-beyond-breathing—like The Corpse Eater’s ability to channel sentience via the very abyss of mortality—is again fueled by an emphasis on the urgency of communal memory:
without ending migration becomes internal
for those who do not leave
keep the memory leaving
de-located,
migration was a test. the destination was the extent to which
a soul could be transformed. The United States wanted to replace
with a clock,
the furnace of assimilation. earth harbors
unintelligible tongues
in the core, tongues of flame, they are called,
the earth answers
with its cavernous body, I release you
into the custody of culture The toll is paid
by the enslaved,
exploited, exterminated (“Gila River”)
Not coincidentally, the hinge of migration is also one of the main hinges on which The Grave on The Wall self-acclimates. Following the narrator’s grandfather Midori Shimoda’s immigration to the United States, The Grave on The Wall relates Midori’s vocation as a photographer; Midori’s excursion to Utah during World War 2 and the Department of Justice’s subsequent tracking of Midori; Midori’s relocation and forced incarceration at Fort Missoula, Montana during the War under suspicion of being a spy for Japan; and Midori’s postwar move to New York City.Via just one of The Grave on The Wall ’s uncannily future-haunting calibrations of memory, Minoru Yamasaki, Midori’s childhood friend who helped facilitate Midori’s move to New York City, also happened to be designer of the selfsame World Trade Center whose institutionalized gone-ness the narrative ponders not-un-ceremonially. A kind of cooly intransigent geometry of memory is thus achieved wherein the past clutters the present ominously. Intricately stitching history-caked prognoses with the specter of prospective memory, The Grave on The Wall corrects the monuments it critiques not merely intellectually but sensorially. Bodily. In lieu of memorial mounds that would defy the orders of greed which daily erase memory in the way of deifying the very defeat of any equilibrium between the earth and humanity, The Grave on The Wall crawls over and across itself via a kind timeliness-beyond-temporality. Indeed, there is even something of an aptly preemptive nostalgia for our shared future embedded in The Grave on The Wall’s forecast for communal memory:
The secret life of memorials is not as much a secret as a subtext: that the memorial will not only outlast the people who might remember, who might have experienced, what is being memorialized, but people in general: human beings, entirely. That is what I see when I see seven mounds or twin holes in the ground (or, for that matter, memorial statues, plaques, signposts, inscriptions, etc): a future in which only memorials remain. Then the future will be the memorial. To all that came before. The mounds and the holes will endure as enigmatic earthworks, expressing, exerting their language, their code, for no audience, but for the people-less earth.