“The Desert,” from Brandon Shimoda’s new collection, “Hydra Medusa,” is emblematic of the complex lyric-historical landscape of borders, dreams, shrines and underworlds found throughout his work. I asked Shimoda about the context and composition of this poem, and his answer was a skillful, evocative illumination of the relationship between life and poetry: “I wrote this poem the night after going out on a water drop with a humanitarian-aid group. We drove for many hours through the desert, putting water out for migrants, people trying to stay alive. We met a man who, in the hallucinatory heat of Arizona, asked how far it was to Kentucky. Some important part of an individual exists in the places they are trying to reach, and it is excruciating. It is like we are following the signs and symbols of our future selves through the wilderness. I write poetry when I am feeling haunted by something — an image, encounter — although not as a means of exorcism. I think about what I have seen, heard, experienced, and I go under. I write poetry at night, partly because I believe there is a more humane, trustworthy logic to be found there, although like dreams, and like the landscapes in which they graze, the poems are themselves the interpretation.” Selected by Anne Boyer
The Desert
By Brandon Shimoda
Three men stood on a hill.
they had been walking three days
two days before that, months before that,
The hill was a short promontory
on which white moons and animals
totems of succor and attraction
inscribed Mirages of these exact men
on every cactus between
the hill and a room with A/C
Are we in Kentucky? they asked.
How many borders do we have to cross
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently “Hydra Medusa” (Nightboat Books, 2023) and “The Grave on the Wall” (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award. His next book, on the memory of Japanese American incarceration, is forthcoming from City Lights in 2024.