“Palo Alto: The Marshes”
Mariana Richardson was the daughter of William Richardson, a sailor from Liverpool who became the first harbormaster of San Francisco Bay and married the daughter of a Mexican officer at the Presidio. The story of John Frémont’s order to Kit Carson to execute Sr. Berryessa and the de Haro brothers can be found in a number of accounts of “the Bear Flag Revolt,” one of the earliest accounts of which is Josiah Royce’s California. There are also a number of accounts of the destruction of the Klamath fishing village of Dokdokwass near what is now the Oregon-California border. A recent one is by Hamilton Sides, Blood and Thunder, 2006. Frémont and Carson undertook the massacre and the burning of the village as revenge for attacks on their party. Historians have established that they attacked the Klamaths by mistake for harryings against them carried out by young men of a nearby Modoc tribe. I first read the story when the U.S. Army was doing the same thing to villages in Vietnam.
“Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions”
The title is taken from a sentence in Hubert Bancroft’s History of California, 1889.
“Like Three Fair Branches From One Root Deriv’d”
A description of the three graces in The Faerie Queen. The book I was reading at the time, which seemed to help with the subjects of desire and beauty and sexuality, was Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 1968, a study of, among other things, the neo-Platonist symbolism in Pre-Raphaelite painting.
“Santa Lucia”
Santa Lucia is the name of the virgin saint and martyr to whom several early Christian legends are attached, and also the name of a mountain range on the central California coast. There is, in the Mission Santa Ynez near Santa Barbara, a Native American painting of a young Indian-looking St. Lucy offering her plucked-out eyes to the viewer on a small plate, something the legendary St. Lucy was said to have done to the Roman patrician who wished to force her into marriage.
“Rusia en 1931”
is the original title of a book about the Soviet Union published in Paris in 1931 by César Vallejo. The archbishop is the Reverend Oscar Romero. Since this poem was written, his assassination has been clearly linked to El Salvador’s right-wing death squads.
“Santa Lucia II”
See the note on “Santa Lucia.” I seem to have imagined the speaker as a woman professionally involved with art.
“Berkeley Eclogue”
The phrase “a century of clouds” is borrowed, of course, from Guillaume Apollinaire, but also from a book of stories with that title by Bruce Boone, published by Black Star Press.
“Dragonflies Mating”
Jaime de Angulo was a well-known folklorist and collector of native California myths and stories. I owe this story about him to my friend Malcom Margolin.
“Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer”
The shrine of the Buddha of Sokkaram is situated on a mountaintop near Kyongju, forty miles inland from Pusan and the site of one of Korea’s oldest Buddhist monasteries.
“Jatun Sacha”
The title comes from the name of a biological study center in the Ecuadorian rain forest on the Rio Napo near the town of Tena. This poem is for my son Luke, who was working there.
“English: An Ode”
The lines in Spanish come from a poem by the Mexican poet Pura López Colomé in her book Un Cristal en Otro, Ediciones Toledo, Mexico City, 1989.
“The Seventh Night”
I borrowed the phrase “staggering tarts” from Mary Karr, with her permission.
“Art and Life”
Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk can be seen at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but I have a distinct memory of having seen it in The Hague at the Mauritshuis Museum in 1976. Perhaps it was on loan. In any case, I have been faithful to my memory.
“I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri”
Fyodor Dostoevsky mistakenly describes Grushenka—in the Constance Garnett translation—as a “brunette.” Alfred Nobel died in 1896. His German company Dynamitakiengesellschaft (DAG) and its subsidiaries, including the Nobel-Dynamite Trust Company in London, manufactured munitions, as did Bofors, the Swedish armaments company he owned until his death.
“A Poem”
“Leon Goure” See Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston: Atlantic Little Brown, 1972, pp. 166–67.
“whole races/Of tropical birds” See The Air War in Indochina, ed. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, Air War Study Group, Cornell University, revised edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972, pp. 94–95, 256–60. Also, generally, Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, New York: The New Press, 2000.
Thanks to the editors of the many journals in which these poems have appeared over the years. Thanks to the Guggenheim, Lannan, Whiting, and MacArthur Foundations which, at different times, gave me the gift of time. And infinite thanks to my editor, Daniel Halpern.