Tell Me
remembered if outlived / as freezing: Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.
harrowed in defeats of language: Michael Heller, “Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If An Ode,” in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.
in history to my barest marrow: Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.
This evening let’s
friendship is not a tragedy: See June Jordan, “Civil Wars” (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.
Delivered Clean
“Delivered vacant” is a developer’s phrase for a building for sale whose tenants have already been evicted. See Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 158.
Transparencies
we are truely sorry . . . Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.
Collaborations
dimdumim: Hebrew for “dawn,” “dusk,” “twilight.”
what thou lovest well . . . See Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 112: “what thou lovest well remains . . . cannot be reft from thee.”
what does not change . . . See Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in his Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5: “What does not change / is the will to change.”
the fascination with what’s easiest . . . See W. B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” in his Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 104.
Alternating Current
The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers’ club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.
V
If some long unborn friend . . . : Muriel Rukeyser, “Tree of Days,” in Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 69.
After Apollinaire & Brassens
Derived from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” and Georges Brassens’s song “Le Pont des Arts.”
Slashes
October ’17 / May ’68 / September ’73: October 1917 marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a determinative event in twentieth-century history. May 1968 saw massive popular U.S. opposition to the war in Vietnam, linked with the movement for Black civil rights and with anticolonial struggles abroad; in France there were uprisings of workers and students. On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet backed by the CIA violently seized power from the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
In wolf-tree, see the former field: See Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19: “A ‘wolf’ tree is a tree within a woods, its size and form, large trunk and horizontal branches, anomalous to the environs of slim-trunked trees with upright branches . . . a clue to the open field in which it once grew alone, branches reaching laterally to the light and up.”
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios—5
You thought you were innocent . . . See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.
Five O’Clock, January 2003
most glorious creature on earth: See Robinson Jeffers, “Ninth Anniversary,” in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52: “there the most glorious / Creature on earth shines in the nights or glitters in the suns, / Or feels of its stone in the blind fog.”