The Southern Review articles from January 1999

The Southern Review archives from January 1999

Trees Beside Water.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1. Stag-headed elders, the book calls them, trash trees. The protrusive is what the eye draws to-- not the canopy of leaves but their stripped limbs sticking through. This makes the elders ...

Briar Rose.(poem)
January 1, 1999... March. Maples waver their red beginnings. Buds and violets. Boys in sloppy T-shirts lope along the railroad tracks, testing their aim at garage doors. In the thicket behind our house we tear out briars and hack at honey...

Corner Grocery in Presov, Czechoslovakia.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The paint-chipped, mildewed walls, the empty shelves, the strict, gray fluorescent lights that probably hadn't worked in years--everything here pointed to that plump, inviting hoard of ripe tomatoes. Paradajku they were...

Two Lessons from the Sky.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1. Africa Sometimes I think too much about the devolution of a body, the word sclerosis becoming more difficult to say, my legs jerking to some music of their own, eyes oblivious to beauty's necessary specifics. I ...

A Brief History of Fathers.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Do we miss a thing we love less if, in going away from us, it grows beautiful? It rained all weekend, and the leaves this morning are going from brown and tan to crimson. The splendor flaming from these...

Shakespeare.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I get up from the couch and move outside, a bird falling from its nest, a snail taking a holiday from its shell, but only to stand on the lawn, an ordinary insomniac, surrounded by the growth systems of garden and...

The waitress.(poem)
January 1, 1999... She brings a drink to the table, sets it down in front of me and smiles, and after a little while she brings another one with a menu and takes the empty glass away. She places before me a plate of veal...

The Day After an Exhibit of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Paintings.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I'm doing errands, thinking about a hip, ironic bestseller in Japan--a manual (complete) for suicide--the author's flip voice casually laying out the choices: a lethal jump from a building or in front of a train-- ...

Postcard from Ireland.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I'm here with the last good weather, walking the inner cove at Rossbeigh, the sun behind me. Out in the bay, barnacle and brant geese ferry themselves into winter islands. The water's a port wine just now, and there's ...

Blind.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Between 1982 and 1989, nearly 150 Cambodian women in middle age presented themselves to doctors in California and said they couldn't see. Some can make out shadows, some can count the fingers of a hand held near...

The Same Cold.(poem)
January 1, 1999... In Minnesota the serious cold arrived like no cold I'd previously experienced, an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity that always took me by surprise. On blizzardy nights with wires down or in the dead-battery dawn...

Odysseus's Secret.(poem)
January 1, 1999... At first he thought only of home, and Penelope. But after a few years, like anyone on his own, he couldn't separate what he'd chosen from what had chosen him. Calypso, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe; a man could forget...

Dog Weather.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up. The paperboy's papers came apart in the wind. Now, almost nothing human moving. Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart in The Caine Mutiny. My breath...

Encroachments.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The madman son of our dear friend Cynthia has been calling my wife. He'd like her to walk his dog while he's on a trip. Far away from us an airplane, flying low over a silver fox farm, caused some vixens to eat...

One Moment and the Next in the Pine Barrens.(poem)
January 1, 1999... One moment a crow on the highway's white line is eating a dead thing, the next a falling pine cone leads my eye to a lost wallet. I tell my wife I think I'm in a story the world is making for me. In it...

Capriccio Italien.(poem)
January 1, 1999... From the mountain drifts down the finest mist, so fine you walk in it, letting it glaze your hair, while boats on the lake bob and blur. This is not your country; everything you see-- cobblestoned ancient streets,...

The Follies Burlesque, Market Street, Kansas City.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The marquee flashed, THE ILLUMINATED RUNWAY OF JOY, and the broadsides were brash and psychedelic as Carmen Miranda's banana-hats and flaunted the large charms of Marie d'Amour, ecdysiast extraordinaire, "direct from Paris...

The Big Bands: Liberal, Kansas, Summer of 1955.(poem)
January 1, 1999... 1. They were supposed to be dead, but they kept coming, shunned by the cities but lunging into the gloom of the outer counties, they kept moving along two-lane highways on huge Greyhounds or night trains destined...

Mrs. Hill.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda, whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them. Mrs. Hill from...

The Buchinger Limbs.(poem)
January 1, 1999... In the year I wrote small, everything I knew could be copied on a page If I practiced until I mastered The perfect penmanship to succeed. A corner for school, thin lines along The bottom where lust and pleasure spoke....

"The Man Who Grows".(poem)
January 1, 1999... Slouchers were the men who wasted their lives. They stayed in the shadows like the dead We didn't know. They curled like old women Who crept to pews they reused each Sunday. They bent like the hunchback who shined shoes ...

So Long, Roy.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Apropos of nothing, it seems, I burst into tears on reading "Roy Rogers Est Mort," or maybe it's because I'm living in Paris and homesick or more likely that Roy looks just like my dad, who's had cancer three times and...

X-Ray of Your Brain at 4 A.M.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Am I not the most generous of women? So when I turn scientist it's not the mad variety but for the good of humanity, and I can't sleep anyway because of my own rosary of worries coupled with your cannonade of snoring, so...

Useless Virtues.(poem)
January 1, 1999... At midnight in the backyard hot tub, pleasantly drunk, three old friends argue One more time the meaning of the Book of Job. Floating in brothel-scented foam Under California constellations, it is easy to picture the...

Variation on a Sundial.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The first time I ever got a really good fix on time, How slowly it moved, how absolutely blunt And inconsiderate of it not to pass, was in a field, Nearly lunch. Since dawn, with brutally surgical Hoes, we had been...

A Coronary in Liposuction.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Hearing how the rope uncoiled from the knot In John's harness, and he fell four hundred feet, I thought of him at twenty, making poems Of his work on the high girders, tying steel: His imagery of cracked welds and icy...

The Double.(poem)
January 1, 1999... She was chopping cilantro when she told me, the green going black with the force of the blade. I've been killing myself in dreams ever since. Sometimes I don't remember. But when I wake and the room looks like a...

The Muse of the Actual.(poem)
January 1, 1999... She'd hate if her mother were proved right-- that having her, he'd never leave his wife. We were sitting on the back deck, looking at the apple trees that had fluttered white a week ago, but now were green and plain. ...

Ricordo.(poem)
January 1, 1999... i. This morning I don't have a clue, a thread, I can't summon the hidden gardens, the cities I lost once and find again in the thickets I penetrate when, brave or desperate, I make my body the thread and go where it...

Swimmers.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Silence for days. The day for which we are silent is the midsummer one that dawns breathless, already bleached of color by the thick haze shielding the sun. Upstairs my husband sleeps, my son, my son's friend. All...

April's Fool.(poem)
January 1, 1999... An armload of snapdragons Clumped beside a ditch, A season of promissory notes Raising the dead for him. He was picturing Jackie Robinson on third as he scored Her name into the oak desk With a Boy Scout...

Spirit Traps.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The angle at which a man Holds up his beloved's skull, Plastered over & smoothed down To neolithic skin, his stare Fixed on Jericho's night sky, is The loneliest image I can think of Today. Ridges of the two...

The Business of Angels.(poem)
January 1, 1999... I don't know, can't say when they first Shook hips like rock stars uprooted. Maybe they stole Flight from Nike of Samothrace & the altar of Zeus at Pergamum, Or modeled after the winged god On a silver coin...

The Procuress (after Honthorst).(poem)
January 1, 1999... If not the old woman Pointing to the young man, If not the young woman's smile Or her low-cut bodice, If not the feather in his hat Or the purse in his left hand, Perhaps it is some bluesy Insinuation:...

Sonny's Face, Sonny's Hands.(poem)
January 1, 1999... for Sonny Ovitt, Yaddo (I) Sonny's Face Most people see his teeth-- more accurately, the space where they once were-- between those skewed incisors that contain what has to be the world's most insouciant smile....

The Founding of Covenant.(poem)
January 1, 1999... The spot commands a western view. Here, annunciatory elm trees colonnade the sunrise. Good drainage is at hand. This elevation, not a promontory but a modest rising of the ground nearly musical in effect, a mild...

Covenant: A Landscape.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Covenant sleeps encircled by two brooks whose waters taste of mountaintops. In summer rivulets enweb the drowsing town, rubbled streambeds angle the freshets down till they collide and coil on snagged stream- ...

Beasts.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Time lingers quietly in attics. Romantics are always fingering some discolored fabric or other, feeling a deep nostalgia for sepia, a mellow sadness at what keeps but yellows. But other...

Water Under the Bridge.(poem)
January 1, 1999... That's water under the bridge, we say, siding with the bridge, and no wonder given the sloping ways of water, which grows so gray and oily, toiling slowly downward, its wide, dented slide ever...

Composition.(poem)
January 1, 1999... Language is a diluted aspect of matter. --Joseph Brodsky No. Not diluted. Flaked, wafered, but not watered. Language is matter leafing like a book with the good taste of rust and exposure, the way...

Diamonds.
January 1, 1999... Is the snail sharpened by crawling over diamonds? Is her foot hardened so it can't carry her? No. Snails make mucus. Even the most precious barriers to lettuce are useless. ...

The Once-Over.
January 1, 1999... Slaves of fatality, at times you remember Your childhood and in the very next breath Your death comes into view In a setting so familiar it could be this house, This room, this open window. A blue jay is screeching...

The School of Metaphysics.
January 1, 1999... Executioner happy to explain How his wristwatch works As he shadows me on the street. I call him that because he is grim and officious And wears black. The clock on the church tower Had stopped at five to...

The Cackle.
January 1, 1999... Wee-hour world, insoluble world, You may as well be a goldfish Swimming in the bowl of ink For all we understand of you. Your small-beer philosopher, Tinhorn preacher, Chronic bellyacher, Is about to die...

On Finding One's Neighbor Dead in His Garden.
January 1, 1999... No one saw the clumsy way his body hit the ground: a crumpled slump, splay of spade and elbows, face down, now starkly motionless against the riffling play of wind lifting lank strands of hair. Near the bed stand grand...

Apostasy, Failed.
January 1, 1999... Wet air and the wet edge of my body meet, the dying edge, in the din and slide of my voluble tongue, spilling past thirsts. It is my right at last to admit those wishes I was vigilant with, guarded against, beat...

The Atomic Age.
January 1, 1999... By eleven o'clock, most of the glasses had been removed from the upper tiers of the champagne fountain and many from the lower, a trail of spills leading away from the garland-draped table. Jeremy Barseleau sat in a folding chair, watching the...

The Smallest Man in the World.
January 1, 1999... Beauty is not a virtue. And beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is a fact like height or symmetry or hair color. Understand that I am not bragging when I say I am the most beautiful woman in the bar. Normally I can make this...

Uncle Joe's Old-Time Communist Nostalgia Bar.
January 1, 1999... When you live on the road and off your wits, it's sound policy to slow down once in a while, and even to come to a stop, albeit temporarily and by way of contrast with the highway flow. (In my pre-road life it never would have occurred to me to...

Happy Birthday, Gabriella.
January 1, 1999... At first you might think Gabriella Brown incapable of speech, but as you came to know her better you would understand her reticence to be completely voluntary, a reasonable response to the noise around her. How the world loves to make noise!...

When Children Count.
January 1, 1999... The only thing Madame Tammy said that may have been overheard went something like, "Oh, hell, it doesn't matter--I'll take paper." She stood in line at a regular checkout aisle in a Winn-Dixie halfway between Charlotte and Atlanta. Fifty...

Less Than Divine: Toni Morrison's Paradise.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Paradise by Toni Morrison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00 (cloth). Heaven has always been a tough sell. For all the specificity of religion's shalts and shalt nots, the prize that justifies the game has remained remarkably nebulous over...

Beauty.
January 1, 1999... I A story printed firmly in pencil on two sheets of a five-by-eight notepad is my earliest surviving written work. My stepfather had pilfered that pad from Portland Gas & Coke Company, where he was putting in long hours as an industrial...

The Gliding Eye: Nabokov's Marvelous Terror.
January 1, 1999... Vladimir Nabokov, according to a reliable source present at his bedside, was chronically unable to fall asleep, or to sleep through the night. "I suffocate in uninterrupted, unbearable darkness," goes an early poem. "The marvelous terror of...

The Battle of the Bunker.
January 1, 1999... After the fiasco of my playwriting class at the University of Iowa, any sensible person would have found something else to write about. The teacher had carried my first scenario, based on Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler, through the...