Gust: Poems

Notes

123 Notes “Honey Behind the Sun” was triggered by a couple of lines from a Muddy Waters song titled “Louisiana Blues”: I’m going down in New Orleans Honey behind the sun “Mawu Names Her Chief Assistant”: In the mythology of Benin (formerly known as Dahomey), Legba is the god of the crossroads and a son of the most powerful deity, the goddess Mawu. Legba, one of the best-known trickster gods of West African mythology, embodies the point of contact between the visible and invisible worlds. “All of This Only Fifty Miles from the Former Home of L. Frank Baum, Creator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”: This poem is based on an interview I conducted with Sharon Weron. “The Love Song of Jephthah’s Daughter” takes its dramatic situation from the eleventh chapter of the book of Judges. Jephthah, a judge over Israel, swears to Yahweh that if he grants him military victory over the Ammonites, he will sacrifice whatever or whoever first emerges from his house when he returns to Gilead. Upon Jephthah’s return his only child comes out of the house, dancing and playing a tambourine in celebration of her father’s triumph. Jephthah and his daughter agree that he must not go back on his promise to the Lord, but she convinces her father to grant her one request: “Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows” (11:37). “Sex and Pentecost,” “Boy in the Buttonbush,” “Little Lotty Knox,” and “Panjandrum” are informed by my study of Zimbabwean poetry in the Shona language. In “Boy in the Buttonbush,” I employ the dzaimbwa meter of Shona tradition. 124 “Carlo Silvestrini, Child of Sunnyside”: The historical context of this fictional sequence is the Italian peonage system that prevailed on Sunnyside Plantation in early-twentieth-century Arkansas. I drew heavily from two sources, conversations with my Italian friends in Arkansas and a book titled The Delta Italians: Their Pursuit of “The Better Life” and Their Struggle Against Mosquitoes, Floods and Prejudice, by Paul V. Canonici. “Arkansas Blacks”: The title refers to heirloom apples developed in the Arkansas Ozarks and known for possessing abundant flavor; thick, dark skins; and the capacity to keep through the winter. “Waking Up in Baghdad”: Species of the Crataegus genus are difficult to verify with certainty because there are so many and they hybridize mischievously in the wild. Sugarhaw is Crataegus viridis or a similar species, perhaps undescribed. ...