Just To See You Once An Island
for Aimee

root has that way of enclosing miles in a single, unadorned stretch. Of making tri-cities all that needs to be fielded, sown. The Hudson midwifes, restores us our iron skin. At night, the tide rides along the wood. We low and crest. I’m bobbing blind. Saw-whets brown in isolate pines. Saw wet body, wet chestnut bod. Even blind, I see you jump – straight up, straight out – into the cirrus, and sink beneath, your toes gracing native, overturning. You rise through the river and reach for my hand. That way of being the sight of all harbors, both the buddy and the bitter




Lamellate, -ose

so that when kings combine to arrange their princes around their stories, the hand and soil will have been rowed. So flood, and dollar, one of heights. Vines hang from the crowns of the guanacaste, dip delicately into the waters. As though you needed them. As though you liked to bind their talons by thread, run the washboard of their beaks along those fibers: stilt music above, and the lure. The last song of the crocus bag, the loose darn of a cumbrous mango. Rakish teams of angelfish, diffused in waves of fanning air, scooped from the dead tourmaline.




Set to Fog, Red Yarn
after Sarah Siegel

Coming to the tree from the river, how costumed they appear, done up by their song stress. Kinglet bones tiny, woven wetly and weathering. An unbroken strand of red yarn is wrapped multiple times around the tree and secures them in their sleep, their wings down-folded and pinned to their breasts, pinning them to bark. A marveling material of redstart, fabricating knitted lakes around their dozing bodies. Taking moments of them, and dull white eggs, and printing through their lists and range. Unravel, enlarged by adult swim. Adult females, more male-like than ever.




With An Exhibition Of Some

Show them showing themselves to their nests: the light has indicted the light. Join them together, itself on the other side of slender: implicate substances. Show them gaining themselves to their stands between the northeast and the gulf coast, from poplar to mangrove, along the – at a distance from: red, yellow, the braided larder. Lift them to palm themselves to gain the burrowing; setting: they’re lucky the light reaches: it is known to weaken. Strengthened, skin is thinnest, lowers.




Unstable Animal
after Robinson Jeffers

ride, cross, will steal. To be (old). Was shot, to be (now) mated. Blasted built. To be (older); to have been here raged, to have been fledged and dared (not) hunt but ate. Has changed; has multiplied; have changed, are enlarged, have become fantastic. (Never) has been changed. Have gone over him, has lived and died: hunts, crying and to be (never) tired; dreams, and hears rattle and thunder. To be good to try, to go down. Have been explored: to be good, to know to be (no more) changed




Brandon Shimoda was born near the Chatsworth Reservoir, grew up in between Turtle Pond and Round Lake, and has since lived near the the East River, the Caribbean, Frenchman Bay, the Housatonic, French Broad and Hudson rivers. He is the co-author, with Phil Cordelli, of The Pines Volume One: Southern California, the first volume in an ongoing collaboration of books, records, videos, and performances, (thepines.blogspot.com). He currently lives near the Clark Fork, in Missoula, Montana.



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