The Southern Review articles from January 2004

The Southern Review archives from January 2004

Irene, Suicide.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Irene, Suicide Claw-footed, white, enameled iron, the water rises; And where is my husband--the brawny aviator, the Olympic broad-shouldered fool? Most likely, telling war stories to other oafs--the old broken rudder, ...

Mary Rockwell Talks to Her Son in the Hospital after He's Been Stabbed during a Fencing Lesson.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Mary Rockwell Talks to Her Son in the Hospital after lie's Been Stabbed during a Fencing Lesson There was no button on the tip? An accident? Is there such a thing? But they say you will not die. I am the one drawn to...

To Mary Rockwell.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... To Mary Rockwell They thought you'd finally killed yourself. Well, of course. You had lived with the threat for so long it had grown smooth as a stone in their pockets. You wore suicide--not the whole gown-- ...

Her Scarlet Letters.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Her Scarlet Letters Since the day on the scaffold I have refused to utter a word that might answer which father made my daughter's body. I clothe her with the fiery ink from my needle. She wears the scripture of my...

Arrhythmia.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Arrhythmia I didn't exercise my heart but watched my fifteen-year-old get his second wind run the fifteen hundred under five. Flying around the track, his red-&-gold shoes barely touching umber earth, my son ...

December Love.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... December Love When, as you will, you leave me in the dust someday, remember how I carved a heart in the ice still whiting out half your rear window, so when you looked back you'd recall the heart I'd lost to you &...

The Joker Family.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Joker Family You took such care of your hair. Now it comes out in clumps. "Maybe my new grandson could spare a share," you joked, Barber Death breathing down your neck. Always joking we are, keeping something...

To my mother.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... To My Mother You took a deep breath. It was by what we weren't told we were told. You sidestepped our questions, big-talked of how cold the winter was, how there was still a test to come in. "Everything will turn out...

The Company of Women.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Company of Women I couldn't forget how much I'd paid for each dress as I said good-bye to the merlot-colored velvet that had blanched my shoulders on the night he breathed along my skin, guessing at the name of...

The Required Accompanying Cover Letter.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Required Accompanying Cover Letter Dear Editor: I'm no ancient Hittite toady, no genuflecting; groveling supplicant hugging the ground and baring his back to serve as a carpet for some parading potentate's...

The Mythological Cod.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Mythological Cod Soft-finned and waiting, she feeds under arctic ice or zigzags down the lacy edges of Norway. Nereid of no fat, stretched sleek up to five, six feet long cutting through the waters ...

Cleopatra's Edict.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Cleopatra's Edict Field Museum, Chicago For all I know, every Ruler, Reigner, brass-knuckled King and High Commissioner, Duke and Grand Vizier of Order and Corruption, each Czar to shining Tsar stirred his T ...

Dust.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Dust The lawn rolled back like a rug in thick jelly rolls of sod to be roiled back, flat again as if nothing had happened. What happened was dust, sealing off one more job. I tell you, there's no getting rid...

The Waiting Room.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Waiting Room To speak of crucial in a life of the merely interesting, to have a yen for it, a calling you might say, is to be perpetually involved in the act of naming. And yet, when I went to the one place...

Class Photos.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Class Photos Delighted to be dressed like this in bow tie And vest, my son sits among his classmates In the photos he's mounted on his walls. I haven't the heart to tell him how soon The names will start absenting...

At Kennywood Park.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... At Kennywood Park The summer my father tried to kill himself By gobbling up all his pills at once, My cousins brought me with them to the park. There I thought only of candy spun from the air, Noah's Ark, the...

The Jade Market at Kowloon.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Jade Market at Kowloon Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness that the crowds arrive each day, press beneath the Kansu Street flyover, between the hours of ten and three-thirty, for the Jade Market at Kowloon. ...

Burning the Rain Forest.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Burning the Rain Forest I watched Webster hold an ax blade to a gray stone spun round and round, its sharp scry and steel-gray skin shedding chips of light. A Fourth of July sparkler in a child's hand is a silver...

Before a Screen Door.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Before a Screen Door Over a darkening spill, water lilies tip, tadpoles beat against a concrete bank, and all the banty hens take to their beds beneath catalpa limbs. Evening comes, weary evening, and Webster sighs...

Dechirage.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Dechirage There are roads out of the secret place within us which we all must move as we go to touch others of loneliness but none of them smooth. And there are no maps. The heart is a blind...

Hopper's Morning Sun.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Hopper's Morning Sun is an uncluttered idyll, subtraction of stuff, distilled elements: Woman. Bed. Window. Light. Life as stillness and angles, hues and shades. In her sunrise-pink shift, she hugs her creamy knees. ...

Rereading Four Quartets.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Rereading Four Quartets When the year 1962 was inscribed in this book, one of your last Christmas gifts, I was eighteen, your eldest. What did I understand of these quartets? Or of all that had happened, and would happen,...

The Idea of Wyoming.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The Idea of Wyoming Nothing in the landscape, burning sage, the winter wind, the howl of the coyote, summer's searing light, homesteaders who starved here, the river bottomland already taken when the area opened for...

Notes to Self before a Journey.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Notes to Self before a Journey When getting ready for a trip it's good to make lists keeping to essentials: lose 4 pounds, practice changing tenses of all those foreign verbs, maybe let the hair grow on your...

A Game of Bowls in Glasgow.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... A Game of Bowls in Glasgow Her husband gone to Canada, she smiles at the man who bowls on lawns not his own, a man who strong-arms precision into grace, placing his grip around an old man's game he makes...

To John Clare.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... To John Clare "snug as comfort's wishes ever lay" So, John, the summer's come again-the great variety of birds is gone, meadowland is scarce to dream upon, and our many poets seldom rhyme. Keats, who shared...

Missing the Eclipse.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Missing the Eclipse for D, January 21, 2000 After the day's sub-zero, sapphire skies and minute, isolated flakes, slow and entire, like a whole note, she rose. Midnight's full eclipse ...

Wick.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Wick We keep watch at dock edge, dusk unfurling at our feet. Waiting for glints to prick the mountain's indigo slope--waterfalls' shimmer under moon's white invitation. A pebble rolls--the children from...

See! I Will Not Forget You. I Have Carved You on the Palm of My Hand.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... See! I Will Not Forget You. I Have Carved You on the Palm of My Hand. (Isaiah 49:15) See! I will not forget you. On the palm of my hand, July sunlight. Where are my gardening gloves? I took yours down from...

A Breakdown.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... A Breakdown A. R. Ammons, 1926-2001 Coming from anywhere, your poems, they traveled anywhere, rucksack on the back, hitching up dungarees, hitching a ride, sentencing down the road, letting their hair down, letting ...

Intentions for My Epitaph.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Intentions for My Epitaph The challenge is to be able to put your life into two lines. I think about this all the time. Who was I, then? Beloved Son, Father, Husband? What was I to the long years of people? There...

A Spot on the Kitchen Floor.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... A Spot on the Kitchen Floor A spot was moving slowly across the kitchen floor. I placed a card in front of it. The bug, for such it was, climbed on, and continued to move... without legs apparently,...

Not Guilty.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Not Guilty When the verdict was announced, "Not guilty," a devil came flying. He picked up the murderer with a claw and held him close... the other claw, his lawyer. "What about the jury?" someone...

Raoul Dufy at Fenway Park, 1950.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Raoul Dufy at Fenway Park, 1950 1. The Letter Dr. Homburger at his desk in Boston rocks in place and feels the cool face of a stethoscope tapping his chest. He gazes down at a magazine photo in which Raoul Duly...

Visitation.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Visitation December 2001 At Serenity Gardens, winter has surrounded us. My mother's room is way too warm for me, just right for her--with an extra sweater. Outside, this uneasy year, her 93rd, lurches...

Baalbek.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Baalbek Near the Temple of Bacchus at the white heat of noon a young woman her sunglasses gleaming in her hair glamorous vision in white pants and sweater perches on a toppled Romanesque...

What We're Made Of.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... What We're Made Of ... just molecules, positions, velocity, physics, properties--and nothing else. --Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's artificial intelligence lab Just starlight, just the strong force, just the physics of...

Hooverville.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Hooverville I wasn't supposed to go where the bums lived, But I could see their houses made out of crates And tin cans hammered flat, out of tar paper And cardboard boxes, the doorways curtained with rags. I watched...

Push.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Push You can find me at the gym before noon where gray men in flip-flops wander the locker room, aiming to remember their locker combinations, and heavy, white-haired women, afraid to dance with the young wives in...

Bess Copeland: Plain as Day.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Bess Copeland: Plain as Day Even in the oldest photos, the farm looks a poor harbor of paint-flaked listing and sinking ships. Behind her the seam-rusted cistern and the slow disaster of the failing barn ...

Cantrip for Lost Ariel.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Cantrip for Lost Ariel Leprechaun spunk, hair of spastic gypsy trollop, left brain of platypus, Mite from fledgling robin, packet of Chilli-O, formaldehyde broth, Mortar of barnacle, broken opal eyes of needlefish, ...

Ode to My Heart.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Ode to My Heart Science tells me it's the size of my closed fist and roughly conical, like a fat dunce's cap. That the fifth and sixth ribs are punching bags for its constant workout. The great arteries and...

The Darkness Together.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... MICHAEL'S MOTHER WALKED INTO HIS ROOM and announced that she was going to supervise packing. "Let me get dressed," Michael said. He was in his underwear. "We've got plenty of time." She made little fluttering motions with her hands and backed...

The Fundraiser's Dance Card.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... THE FUNDRAISER'S NAME was Lee Ann Mercer and she wanted to go dancing. It was one of those late spring Friday nights when the wind was warm and wet and the air smelled like an overly chlorinated pool and everyone wanted to do something they...

Goliath's Story.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... THE SCRIVENER SMOOTHS THE DAMP CLAY. With his stylus he presses down the call to the face-off: "Valley of Elah, Exit 27 off the Beersheba-Shiloh Freeway. The day after the first full moon in Kislev. Mark ye this number: 24. Later. P.S. Ye are...

The Man Who Understood Everybody.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... HOWARD TOOK A LOOK AT 2 FORRESTER ROAD, and knew it was kids. Some places were jobs. Others were leisure sports--ten-speeds hanging from the garage ceiling. Where he'd been this morning, 5380 Cordelia, had been books, which was a real stretch...

Private Dance.(Short Story)
January 1, 2004... IT WAS ABOUT THREE IN THE MORNING the Friday we started two-a-days when Cindy got up out of a dead sleep and came into my TV room and caught me lolled back on the couch watching The Gardens of Gomorrah II with my dick in my hand. That's the one...

Return to Ship Island.(appreciation of Elizabeth Spencer)(Biography)
January 1, 2004... I FIRST GOT DRUNK ON ELIZABETH SPENCER AT COLLEGE. Maybe "besotted" is a more ladylike term, but let's just say drunk. You'll see why in a minute. Introduced to Elizabeth Spencer's fiction by Louis Rubin in his southern literature class, I...

Painting by the Numbers in Paul Valery.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS, Valery is the true son of Oscar. Don't speak to him of content, only a means to the end. This end is the creating of an autonomous artifact that transcends moral judgment and disavows paternity, as if poetry were...

Landscape and Identity: Charles Wright's Backyard Metaphysics.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... ... being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. --T'u Lung (T'u Ch'ihshui) THE CREATIVE...