The Southern Review articles from January 1995

The Southern Review archives from January 1995

Auction. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Some things bring nothing. Later there will be a bonfire of palm-worn plow handles. But a doll, pallid--china hands fractured--brings twenty dollars. His bed they have hauled out, the covers still on it, an old man's nest of tangled flannel. I...

House beside a stream. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... This house that two created near a river once glowed within its forest in our thought. We paced and marked the boundaries of our lot, then cleared the brook of vines, working together. We held each other and kissed as sun grew red. A log had...

Figure. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... I. In the garden, tufts of purple toadflax. A world the mind couldn't know what to make of, so palpable it was, so taken in by the senses. In the beginning, nothing could be made. Not mind but matter appeared to matter.... Therefore, a...

Strong's winter. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... When I hear it said of gods and great literature that they will never die, a cowered boy comes to mind who carried the name Len Strong and seemed proud the day he watched the snow fall in the schoolyard and said that God did not exist, that he...

Cinderella revisited. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Saturday night, I've exchanged my red satin pumps for Nikes. Slide toes and heels into soft-lined fabric and sit awhile, legs propped across arms of my favorite chair. By the fireplace of cooling ashes, book in hand, I sip wild berry zinger, turn...

October sabbatical. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Hanging in the trees, left-over cloud vapor. Later, slits of sunlight tangle in branches. It is the time of caterpillars. My neighbor has chopped down dried cornstalks in his backyard, turned the soil. Brown willow oak leaves angle, fall...

White beach. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Once in a while in the sounds of wind and voices there is some story of us, and the sound of making love when both persons are inside it. I didn't know that, then, when we all were too young to know because even if we had done it we had...

Home for the holidays. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... We're here for the season, taking another creche course in theology and family grit, uncles and cousins and the pink plastic body of an inchling boy-king. It's a post-Jehovah accouchement-- Jehovah, who paved in brimstone the crooked way to his...

On passing fifty. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... When I see a deer, innocent across the pasture, nuzzling its soft nose down, it is always the same deer I see, no matter that the deer has died many times, its hide peeled from its bones, its face given to the ants, it is the same. So why...

Catalpa, meaning head with wings. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The stars beyond the black whirlpool of the catalpa branches, stars of February crusted with blue ice, the stars a man or woman lost might tell the hour by, the latitude, might, by starlight only, see each other, two faint masses without feature,...

Giotto's angel over the dead Christ spread his arms in flight. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Blue violets are back beside the road, each upper pair of petals splayed as if in pain to let a wound go deeper. In the cream cleft purple veins trail off. The lower petals meet with white pubescences on either side, and under that a fifth, more...

The dredges. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Then there is another astonishment: the smell of the memory of sweat, Residues of sunlight on sheets, the lovers' bodies glowing with spindrift and salt. I think of these things in Bellingham, where the elemental suffocation of rain Obscures...

Snapper. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Who'd have dreamed of her there, deep, unseen, if every summer, once or twice, some boy, casting for stocked trout, hadn't hooked her, dragged her to the edge, his new rod trembling at her pull. Fighting to keep her, the others swelling around...

The choice. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Their fall from heaven was a transformation to a beauty of a different kind, the silver and copper of their joints and hands melting as they plunged to earth and through it, in air the wooden torsos and heads burning around the brass eyes,...

The money changer. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... When I arrived in Bogoti, the first thing I wanted to do was change money, but Bill said not to use the banks because he knew a black-market money changer who'd give me a much better rate. So we went up to the eighth floor of this building and...

Earhart ascending. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Earhart Ascending The white wing banking as though a steeple, and the ocean blazes everywhere as when after the last loving Amen the doors swing wide and the congregation, suddenly blind, cannot move, until at last neighbors take form once...

Flowers, things vital and unvital. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Flowers, Things Vital and Unvital Smells of flowers, things vital and unvital fill the hallways, sweep the opened rooms. In the garden, piles of vegetables spill back onto the shoveled loam, and despite this last March wind the tarps are...

The last evening. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The Last Evening And night and the large wheels turn, rutting the earth toward the cannons' thunder. He looked up from the piano to find her across the room, her face a warning and a prayer, mirroring, he realized, his own. Outside, a fresh...

The Stonewall Jackson Hotel. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The Stonewall Jackson Hotel The doormats had holes in them not quite large enough to catch a penny. The doors were heavy and glass. Men who pushed their way through wore sack suits and striped ties. Their pockets sang with the song of silver...

A definition. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... A Definition Love, you once told me, means you could give your wife an enema if it came to that. You say the sweetest things, I thought. I was young and childless and could not imagine allowing anyone that much access. When we met, you were...

For an artist with Parkinson's. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... For an Artist with Parkinson's So still beside the window in a chair Whose wheels you cannot move and barely clutch, You scan with eyes strong medicine has blurred A winter world once rendered by your touch. Black seedpods and a last few...

Hard laughter. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Laughter is a kind of prayer. --Kierkegaard When I sang those lines about Christ, who arose, so the author of the hymn would have had it, with a "triumph o'er his foes," I was four years old, and proclaimed he had triumphed "o'er his clothes."...

River road. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... It isn't only the old can't why they go so slow along the river road. Hills and turns, no-passing lines and I'm in a hurry and I'm behind some farmer finished plowing years ago, and now going nowhere slow. He'll watch the river, wander over...

The ides of July. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The next day we would go opposite ways, go forward, go backward, though I don't know who went which, and I will never know why. You packed a box, looked into my eyes, lied. When did the lies start and have they now stopped? My heart nearly...

The last animal dies in the Sarajevo zoo. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... A fall rain is bringing the leaves down, erasing ambiguities of shape, revealing the lie of our land as it is, trees releasing the shriveled, odd-shaped pieces of themselves, untangling the mangle of green. I see them staggering stark and lean...

Twenty-one years. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... That long ago we drove ourselves To the thermal pool and floated hours In its uterine calm, naked as newts; Then hauled our sapped bliss back uphill To the cheap hotel; and on a bed That had plainly borne the labors of love For at least three...

The God doll. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Up in the corner where you've put her, A spider finger-walks its way Over its web, retrieves a fly, then backs The other way to eat and wait, wait and eat. Later, what's left sags in the web's geometry. Knocked down by broom, brush, tired...

Dog, dog, object, object. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Head lowered to his snuffling After a sensed and senseless knowing Of the grassy world where pattern's movement And shape's the shadow of a shape, He's found a trail, yanks after it, Whimpers, runs, leash rising taut, then stops, Turns,...

Tuberculosis. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Early phlegm is yellow; later, green. There must be something blue inside the body. Perhaps infection is blue. Perhaps gulps of azure sky cloud the respiratory system or waft into the skull with songs of nightingale and melancholy. Hans...

Making up. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Is anything else as important? My neighbor, 15, holds a bag of groceries, staring from behind the pyracantha at the couple I've watched all summer, bronze boy on a bike, blond girl dancing on her stoop. They've argued, laughed, hugged and kissed,...

On a ferryboat. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... From the downtown docks they towed Sappho around the High Battery and up the Ashley River, at floodwater coved her just off the marsh's edge, moored firmly, shored her hull cradled in place to go aground with the receding tide, hereafter a boat...

Drinking gift whiskey. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Between white miles of snowfall where the land drifts, gliding black water sears the local cold hump of place that is home to worn paths in briars and my father and I who count, in the abacus of days, another dusk as the sun disappears by degrees...

The Southern poet is pursued by Eliot. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The Southern Poet Is Pursued by Eliot If you'd just killed more birds or deer in your youth, or had been the one to behead that Jap colonel, you think, maybe he wouldn't be there in the street under his stupid bowler, about, it seems, to tap...

Annual Game, Thrumpton Cricket Ground. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Annual Game, Thrumpton Cricket Ground Game today at the Thrumpton Cricket Ground, its trimmed grass barely claimed from fields where sheep and cattle graze. We luff our blanket in a patch clear of droppings, then settle to the dance around the...

Anything of mine you find is yours. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Anything of Mine You Find Is Yours I'll go run look between the butter and oysters. You might look back beneath the earthen dam and bug-eaten music. I've already been from A to I Am Going Home to Mother. I'll pass on Gothic Street. Don't...

The hat. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... The Hat Like a new bride's wedding cake, my mother's pillbox saved, still firm, and I won't have it. It smells like her, though, black nap furring in my hands as I lift it from the box and its hard little combs bite into my thumbs. My sisters...

Thinking of my mother. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Thinking of My Mother She lived into her death and was gone before her dying. All but her breath wrecked years before. Her brain's once-lively pages crumbled into tight wads, grew hard as rock. Voice, eyes, teeth, bladder, bowels--all wrecked...

Vespers. (poem) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... Because it was a pilgrimage, we left during the fifth hour of daylight like the children in our textbooks marching off to fight with devils. Not yet women but no longer girls, my sisters and I marched behind our mother to the river where a...

Love in Singapore. (short story) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... MICHAEL DUMAS STROLLED around the base camp at Cam Ranh Bay with his friends. Cooper and Blaine had taped plastic bags of marijuana to their cocks. They smiled knowingly at each other when they walked past the amnesty boxes where soldiers were...

The rebirth of the blues. (short story) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... A WIDOW, she has come to this orphanage, the Home for Unwed Mothers in Paris, Arkansas, to suffer here the last hours of her daughter's reckless pregnancy. A pregnancy initiated nine months before by such a man as would resume his strangerliness...

The master of Shongalo. (short story) (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... WE HAVE IT NOW before us and know at least that it isn't any dream. The name is plain enough, written down in the old guidebook of the state I just yesterday found by accident on the shelves. The book was done by WPA commission back in the...

Ex machina: reading the mind of the South. (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... [T]he machine was obviously going to pieces. .. The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles. --Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony"...

Roads from Stantonsburg: the poetry of James Applewhite. (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... I I do remember occasions of visiting back during my early years of college and once again experiencing what I have now almost forgotten --and that is a sensation of being so utterly at home in, and a part of, a place, that one feels...

Work and poetry, the father tongue. (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... A FEW YEARS AGO a critic pointed out, in Poetry, that more of my poems are about male characters than about women. I remember being surprised because at the time I was writing a series of prose stories often narrated by women characters and...

Re-viewing Lewis Simpson. (Contemporary Southern Writing)
January 1, 1995... I AM ONCE AGAIN WRITING about Lewis Simpson, and Lewis Simpson is once again writing about the South. He has, in this selection of essays written over the past fifteen years, continued his lifelong struggle to tell about the South. His telling is...