ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES

Gratitude to the editors and acknowledgments to the publications where these poems originally appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

COMMON KNOWLEDGE: “The Night of the Comet,” “Spanish Song”

CONJUNCTIONS: “The Seminar,” “The Witness,” “The Reader,” “The Hawk,” “The Pond,” “Learning to Drown,” “The Image,” “The Mayflies,” “My Favorite Metaphor,” “Beauty & The Cripple”

DOUBLE CONE QUARTERLY (Ventanawild.org): “The Double Altar on Pine Ridge”

FIRST THINGS:“Ancestral Tumulus”

NUMBERS (England): “The Hawk,” “The Pond,” “The Image,” “My Favorite Metaphor,” “Beauty & The Cripple”

PN REVIEW (England): “Mimesis,” “Sempervirens in Winter,” “The Wreck of the Psyche” “The Seminar,” “The Reader”

POESIA (Milan, with Italian translations by Carlo Anceschi): “Rates of Combustion,” “Habitat,” “First Light,” “WL 8338,” “Ode on Water,” “To a Swiss Mountaineer,” “The Seminar,” “The Witness,” “The Reader,” “The Hawk,” “The Pond,” “A Painted Hemisphere,” “Garcés in Oraibe (July 3, 1776)”

POETRY (Oct. 2003): “Caesar,” “Doxology,” “The Juggernaut of the Apocalypse”

slate.com: “Habitat,” “First Light,” “The Seamstress,” “Temperament,” “Sierra Gentians,” “Siegfried's Destiny,” “Drake's Psalmistry,” “Wild Mustard Remembers,” “Two Million Feet of Vinyl”

THE THREEPENNY REVIEW: “The Resurrection of the Body,” “Rates of Combustion,” “Pyramid Scheme,” “Sovereignty,” “A Victorian Connoisseur of Sunsets,” “WL 8338,” “Ode on Water,” “Ranch House at Swarts,” “Cinnabar,” “Terms of Employment,” “Advent,” “Paisano”

TIKKUN: “An Oracle Madrone”

ZYZZYVA: “Near Buckeye Forks”

“Doxology” is included in the California Legacy Anthology of Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, Jack Hicks, and Chryss Yost.

“First Light” is set in type designed by David Lance Goines in porcelain enamel on cast-iron set into the sidewalk in the Poetry Walk on Addison Street in Berkeley and is included in the Addison Street Anthology edited by Jessica Fisher and Robert Hass.

“Pyramid Scheme” was published as an ABC No Rio Broadside by Peter Spagnuolo.

I wish to express my appreciation to Wendy Lesser, publisher and editor of The Threepenny Review, and to Robert Pinsky, poetry editor at Slate.com.

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“Habitat”: VELENO NON TOCCARE: “Poison, Don't Touch.”

The epigraph of “Exposure” is from “South Coast” by Lillian Bos Ross; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott's album South Coast includes a performance. In California anywhere there are deer there are cougar, and the deer know it.

“The Seamstress” is for Cynthia Ponce Martinez with the permission of David Martinez.

“Mimesis” is in memory of California painter Oma Perry (1880–1961).

“Sempervirens in Winter” is for Natalie and Jeff, Maxine and Miles. Coast Redwood is Sequoia sempervirens.

“Vernacular” is for Jack Grosse, for the Lost Dogs, and for friends at the Peak.

“Quill”: inter odoratum laud nemus: “within the aromatic laurel grove.” Virgil, Aeneid, Bk. VI.

“Consolation to a Dancer” is in memory of Jerry Garcia, to Teri Jasman, for the dancers and the dance, from The 418 concentrically outward.

“Poetics” is for Gaelen and Emily Nyokka-Morrell.

“Night of the Comet” is a translation from the Italian of Notte della cometa, made in collaboration with the author, Carlo Anceschi.

“WL 8338” is for Greg Muck. On a topographic map WL 8338 indicates that the Water Level of the lake is 8,338 feet above sea level; unnamed lakes are designated in these terms.

“Ode on Water”: The epigraph is the beginning of Pindar's First Olympian Ode; my first line translates it. Juppiter tonans in excelsis misquotes Horace, “Jupiter thundering on high.” hupsibremetes Zeus (hoopsy-BREM-et-ace Zeus), Homer's “high-thundering Zeus.” “Donner der Herr”: Wagner's Lord Thunder.

In The Muses’ Birdcage: The epigraph is Timon of Phlius, Fragment 60 ed. Wachsmuth.

“My Favorite Metaphor” is for J.V. among the dead, and for J.P.D. among the living.

Substrate: amartyron ouden aeido (a-MAR-turon OO-den a-AY-doe): Callimachus, Fragment 612: “I'm interested in the poetry of fact” … “I sing nothing without witness” … “This is a documentary poem.” … “Don't blame me: it says right here …” … “… as the Booke us telles…” (Chaucer) … “No fact without a footnote.” …

“Fandango”: I thank Kevin L. Stewart of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, for providing a copy of a typed transcript of the pertinent passage of Edward Bell's manuscript journal. H.M.S. Chatham was part of the English expedition under Capt. George Vancouver exploring and mapping the northwest coast of North America. Bell uses “borego” as the name of a local dance, otherwise unknown; “borrego” means “sheep, silly lamb, simpleton,” and also “a hoax.” Maybe the women of Monterrey were putting on their visitors.

“Brandy & Cigars”: Harrison G. Rogers was Jedediah Smith's steward on his expedition to California in 1826–1827. The Virgin of Guadalupe (la Virgen del Tepeyac) appeared to Juan Diego in 1531.

“Wild Mustard Remembers”: The title is from a poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Freeway 280” (in Emplumada). William Buckle (1803–ca. 1859), an English sailor, landed in Southern California before 1823 and came north after the drought of 1828–1829. He was baptized “José Guillermo” in Monterey in 1829 and married Antonia Castro. Over the next fifteen years they had eight children including five daughters (four by 1840), all at Branciforte (Santa Cruz). He prospered as a lumberman and shipbuilder and in 1838 obtained confirmation of the grant of La Carbonera, at Swanton, Santa Cruz County.

“Epistemology” is derived from the oral autobiography of Lucy Young transcribed by Edith V. A. Murphey and published in the California Historical Society Quarterly in December 1941.

“Spanish Song” is a translation from the Spanish of a nineteenth-century California cancionero text of the poem of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870), “Volverán las oscuras golondrinas,” commonly called “Las Golondrinas de Bécquer,” “The Swallows of Bécquer.”

“When the Talkies Came to Town” is in memory of Forrest Baird.

“Orion the Hunter” and “Paisano” are in memory of Frank Cisternino.

I am grateful for the benefit of a fellowship from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which materially supported the preliminaries of Substrate.