The Southern Review articles from January 2000

The Southern Review archives from January 2000

Timber.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... My body lies over the ocean Oh bring back my body to me we boys used to shout in music class, over that pleading piano and Miss Bonnie Armbruster's grand, maternal sighs. Next September, when music became ...

Pomegranate.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Consider this Asiatic fruit with only enough flesh to feed a myth, but it would be too easy to mention Persephone's ascent from the memorial darkness and up that stairway of her famous misfortune, a girl clutching a few...

I Write My Mother a Poem.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Sometimes I feel her easing further into her grave, resigned, as always, and I have to come to her rescue. Like now, when I have so much else to do. Not that she'd want a poem. She would have been proud, of course, of...

Sky Burial.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... 1. Their Chinese overlords think it bizarre, the dumb show of a slow, woeful race, this setting out of the dead like a village supper and summoning the vultures. The old Tibetans, chafing under the rifles of a...

Killing Time.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... How many years before me, how many yet to come these apple trees have hung against the wind, stippled with ice, each bough bending to wind, then straightening, come spring, to shatter, blossoming, all expectations: every...

Chesapeake Revelation, 1786.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... William Glendinning, an itinerant preacher who went mad in 1785, believed that study of the Bible and theology led him to the wayward speculations that cost him his salvation. Though fearsome to reveal, my brethren, hear Me out,...

Hopper Town.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The sun does its trick on the floorboards. Just minutes ago lined with ordinary dust, each board turns an impossible color. Call it paralysis, how the afternoon stops and catches. Call it privacy so awful, ...

De Chirico at the Mall.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... This could be the arcade he painted before he began bad imitations of himself. Tiles display their perfect squares, and shadows lie in the walkways like wolves. He could tip the plane, perhaps, and reverse...

Lolo.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... His alter ego is a donkey, after all, Picasso's nemesis, Lolo, mascot of the Lapin Agile. Dorgeles borrowed her from Fred,, owner of the bistro, and aiming to take revenge because Picasso refused to paint his mother, ...

To Walt Whitman.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... That old man--tramping down Flatbush Avenue-- with a cane, white beard, light-brown tunic and gray felt trooper hat--that was you-- Walt--just like your picture--when you held court in Camden--avuncular, garrulous, and...

Anniversary.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... We learn, today, a girl who attended Our wedding has been murdered. Thirty years, We say, guessing her age--eleven? twelve?-- From the old photographs that help us tell. We read the articles from three papers-- ...

Bird Elegy.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... In post-apocalypse stories, when more Than roaches survive, one woman remains In the ruined world, and always she's found By surviving men who cross continents, Sail oceans, or stumble from a nearby, Accidental shield...

Cruiser.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... We would quicken in the vinyl (velour if we were lucky) of our third mothers, with their huge eight-chambered hearts & cleavage deep to the very block, with their buxom dashboards perfumed with specious pine, their dials...

Work.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... This afternoon, my father is working in the rock garden I helped him plant back when we were kids. He's stabbing his trowel into Pennsylvania, the small plot I own now, displacing the dirt as his body did, before my...

Joy.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... I stayed in bed for days and watched a spider in the light spin an airy web above my head, something cool and loose, without the use of force, or weight. That time, I nearly died of joy. I was a child....

Day.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... It was a day--a bit of camouflage cloth through which the sun could shine. I decided to hang the laundry on a line. It was another day in my civilian life. Monday, the day of lost keys. Tuesday the breathing...

The Last Restaurant.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Somewhere in Tuscany, Provence, Oaxaca, a restaurant you've never seen calls you all your life, its menu unrequited-- a restaurant so good no one knows it. It opens for one dinner only; the officious maitre d' leads...

For the Writer of a Poem Found in a Bag of Clothes in an Abandoned House.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Fourteen mold-stained lines, unsigned, a triangular hole where something caught, tore free. The sheet folded letterwise in thirds, halved again to fit a pocket. Gliding over the ice With mittened fingers and white...

The Good-bye.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... He's a child: he kisses the house. It happens in an instant, a kiss of affiliation, of letting go. He's about to leave home, the small changes in the room he's always had: crib to bed, seasonal light playing on...

Fist.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The master talks about a life, how it goes on building dead coral, leaving something beautiful, but this is not the way of children. No, they take their lives elsewhere, into thin air. The lost, the saved, either...

Something to Save.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Circling, the leaves above me find the ground, by now invisible, and I lie down in them thinking of babies, how in all my running days, I thought I'd find one. Not in the vine-filled ditch thick with yellow buds...

"Life of Elvis".(Poem)
January 1, 2000... is what we called it: five sixth-grade girls in sleepover heaven. Mary Lane ruled us all, claimed the part of Elvis, her man since the cradle. She'd perfected his story with the hips and knees, pantomiming each song in...

The Bow.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Protector of animals, director of canine gymnastics, the parade of cats persuaded to use the swing and slide; believer in every creature's conversation lent to her attentive ear, my daughter is not content to simply be...

Figure of Formal Loss: Pearl.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... No longer someone's mother, she's still a woman, doing the usual chores. Now she's bending over melons, a fragrant pile in the grocery store, a laden basket. And there it is: gold, swollen to its ultimate paleness, a...

Beads.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... What crumb is the wasp eating, trapped days between windows, its body two beads impossibly hinged, its body black beads, light on them a wetness, a shine, a weight hoisted magnificent inches; all morning the wasp...

Animal Hides.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... As if in flight they ascend on barn-back, shed-side: bobcat and fox, raccoon and black bear, limbs splayed as if gliding on wind-lift as coats dry and tan to become somehow more than brag of well-hid trap, true...

Madison County: June 1999.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Where North Carolina locks like a final puzzle piece into eastern Tennessee, old songs of salvation rise through static on Sunday night in this mountain county where my name echoes on gravestones dimmed by...

Boots.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... THE BEST THING ABOUT BOOTS was the way she'd take me down to the trash pile, her all hunched over with her stick and me with a paper sack in case we found any items of interest. Mostly it was just old, beat-up shoes. Any kind of shoe you could...

Fuel for the Millennium.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... THE BANKS WERE DOOMED. Harbert Little knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. And without the banks, everything else would fail--the stock markets, of course, but also the government and then the power company, the water and sewer, law and order,...

Hunting Country.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... SHE HEARD THE OLD FOOL pull into the driveway. How could she miss him? A hundred times she had told him to get his truck fixed, but he never would do it. He couldn't hear was the problem, and he wouldn't admit that he couldn't hear, so what did...

The Bogo-Indian Defense.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. I sensed it as soon as I walked into the doughnut shop. Nobody was playing chess, where always before there had been at least one game going on. All the guys just sat glumly at the little plastic tables, staring into...

Graveyard Shift: 1973.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... I WOKE UP. I CAME OUT of the guilt you are in when you sleep in the middle of the day. I had worked the graveyard shift at the slaughterhouse and got home that morning at seven. All night I had sat in my security guard's glass booth listening...

De/Compositions: Writing Wrong.
January 1, 2000... I KEEP IMAGINING THAT SOME CRITIC will pluck this book off a store shelf, where it sat beside Instant Genius: The Feel-Good Workshop and You ARE a Victim: Write to Prove It. Riffling through the pages, he/she thinks, "A course in bad poetry!...

The Conclave.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... PACEM IN TERRIS, 11 APRIL 1963: Quod ad familiam attinet, quae in matrimonio nititur, libere nimirum contracto, uno, indissolubili, ipsam existimari opus est tamquam humanae societatis primum et naturale semen. Ex quo oritur, ut eidem sit...

Human Voices.
January 1, 2000... IF I REMEMBER RIGHT, I was in high school when I first read that marvelously ambiguous last line of T. S. Eliot's, "till human voices wake us and we drown." Not yet having acquired my mature temperament's predilection for the tragic, I...

Weedpatch.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... PRIVACY IS THE LEAST OF THE PROMISES made by this sad, scorching country. Whatever happens to you here happens wholly in the open. At the edge of a lettuce field a tin shack, an old toolshed by the looks of it, has partially collapsed,...

Closing the Distance to Cold Mountain.(Short Story)
January 1, 2000... TOWARD THE END OF CHARLES FRAZIER'S NOVEL Cold Mountain, a fiddler and a banjo-player give a command performance for the men who will soon become their executioners. The musicians are "outliers," men avoiding service in the Confederate army,...

The Invention of the Kirby Poem.
January 1, 2000... The Death of Fred Snodgrass San Francisco, April 6, 1974. It says here in the Chronicle: "Fred Snodgrass, who muffed an easy fly ball that helped to cost The New York Giants the 1912 ...

Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and Chana Bloch's Mrs. Dumpty.
January 1, 2000... IN 1995, CHANA BLOCH AND ARIEL BLOCH published their accessible, joyous, and frankly erotic translation of the Song o/Songs: "Feast, friends, and drink/till you are drunk with love!" Meticulous in its scholarship and exquisite in its poetic...