“Binding Spell”: Lines 15–18 are from Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, edited by John G. Gager, Oxford University Press, 1992.
“In Certain Situations I’m Very Much Against Bird Song”: Lines 17–18 quote Randall Jarrell’s “The Mockingbird”; lines 19–20 quote Marianne Moore’s “England”; line 24 quotes Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; and lines 24–27 quote Wallace Stevens’s “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.”
“ ‘in his house by the wayside he entertained all comers’ ”: The title as well as the quoted words and phrases in lines 10–11 and 14 are from The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore, University of Chicago Press, 1951 and 1979.