Wolf OR-7:

This poem was built as I watched a few different websites devoted to recording the movements of the wolf named OR-7.

Ink-Light:

The phrase “I touch her with the eyes of my skin” is taken from Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s work titled The Eyes of the Skin.

The italicized ingredients listed in the third stanza are taken from an old recipe for ink.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips:

The line “I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now” is from Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock’s song “It Takes Two.”

The orchard of Alcinous is referenced as described in The Odyssey. It was Odysseus’s last stop before returning home.

The final stanza is about Spanish bullfighter Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, known as Manolete, who Lorca wrote about in several poems. He died in his final season of bullfighting. As he killed the Miura bull named Islero, the bull gored him.

That Which Cannot Be Stilled:

This poem is part of the series written with Ada Limón. The phrase “land and its moving” is taken from the letter Ada wrote me, to which I was responding.

“Do you feel a sense of doom?” is a question a doctor asked me when I went to the emergency room for an anxiety attack.

“It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things / definitely aren’t it” are lines by John Ashbery in his poem “Life Is a Dream.”

“Beloved Occupier” is a term a Palestinian student used to address Israel in a poem he wrote and read to us at Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, West Bank, where I was a guest of the Palestinian Literary Festival. He isn’t named here for his own safety.

“Stiff Green Gallop” is from the Doors’ song “Horse Latitudes.”

exhibits from The American Water Museum:

This space has been on my mind since I first read Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Water Museum. The poem is not in conversation with Luis’s book directly, but the book’s title made a water museum a real space in my wonders. This poem is a small part of how the American Water Museum of my mind exists.

The phrase “even a river will die of thirst” is echoing the title of a collection of writings by Mahmoud Darwish: A River Will Die of Thirst.

Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?:

This is another poem in reply to Ada Limón’s letter-poems. There is a nod to Robert Creeley at the end, since Ada had brought him into our conversation. In his poem “Song,” he opens and ends the poem with the lines, “What I took in my hand / grew in weight,” and “What / I took in my hand / grows in weight.” I wasn’t thinking of his poem when I read Ada’s letter, but after going back through the poems, I believe this line must have come from Creeley, or for him.

If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert: