The poem also includes the trigger line of Steve Reich’s 1965 work, ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (magnetic tape with phase shift, 17 minutes 50 seconds), a pioneering manifestation of minimalist music. This work uses two Wollensak tape recorders and deploys looping as well as the effect of phase shift, as the two recordings gradually fall out of, and eventually return to, sync. ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ was conceived in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the eerie proximity of nuclear catastrophe. The source material for this work is the recording, with ambient sound, of an apocalyptic sermon by Brother Walter, a Pentecostal preacher addressing passers-by in San Francisco’s Union Square in 1964. Beginning with the story of Noah and the Flood, Brother Walter predicts a dire end to decadent humankind. ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ may be experienced online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugqRAX7xQE (accessed 23 March 2017).

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‘Philip Guston, in (Pretty Much) His Own Words’

This poem incorporates a number of phrases and sentences from the presentations, informal talks, exchanges and occasional writings of the artist Philip Guston (1913–1980), culled from Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (Clark Coolidge ed. with an Introduction by Dore Ashton; Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).

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‘Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake”’

Nicolas Poussin’s painting, ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ (probably 1648), hangs in the National Gallery, London (Inventory number: NG5763).

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‘Open for Business’

‘Hanv saiba poltoddi voita’ (‘I’m going across the river’), a Konkani song indelibly associated with Goa, belongs to the genre of the deknni, a modern musical form that uses folk imagery and allusions. ‘Hanv saiba’ was composed by the Goan musician Carlos Eugenio Ferreira (1860–1926) in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of the song is a temple dancer who tries to convince a boatman to take her across a river, to where a wedding celebration is in progress, and where she wishes to perform. The riverine boundary is a coded reference to the continual shifting of the border between Portuguese-ruled Goa and the Hindu territories that neighboured it between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, especially during the Old and the New Conquests. For people in Goa, this meant the division of families and communities, the fraying of older social relationships and the emergence of new solidarities.

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‘Bactrian Drachma’

Between the second century BC and the first century CE, a large swathe of northern and north-western India – the definition here includes parts of present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia – was ruled by a multitude of ‘Indo-Greek’ kingdoms. The rulers and populations of these kingdoms embodied a rich ethnic and cultural confluence of Indic, Greek, Persian, Central Asian and Chinese elements. Bactria extended across parts of today’s Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.