The Southern Review articles from June 1996

The Southern Review archives from June 1996

The poet, walking on the beach in winter, thinks of his passbook.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Every penny he had to his name was in that one account. He'd already passed the future, Roosevelt, the shame of Munich, Byron, Robespierre, the High Baroque, and after the electric bill he would be stranded in the...

The immaculate conception.(poem)
June 22, 1996... She was leased out like pasture. Could she love it? He farmed her womb and left perfection grazing there, The lightning accidents of sex, the wisdom got when the body yields to the catastrophic touch that turns...

Slow.(poem)
June 22, 1996... I like the joke about the snail who mugged the turtle who when asked by the policeman to recount the sequence of events couldn't because it all happened so fast. It's the only joke I know, the one I always...

Mistakes of one kind or another.(poem)
June 22, 1996... A friend of mine once had a student who wrote: "In the great body of English literature, John Milton stands out as a vital organ." What do you say to that? At least he didn't leave the modifier dangling. And in...

Fly.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Bad luck and the richness of deprivation and all that I have turned away from have brought me to this stream again. Walking here I could. feel the weight of each betrayal, each leaving rise like vapor in the...

Like wings.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Since you're already standing off-balance on the edge, why not speak of it? Take a look at what lies precipitously on the other side at the bottom of a forty-foot fall -- not enough to kill you, probably, or break your...

At the well-endowed museum; or, curse of the mummy's tomb.(poem)
June 22, 1996... 1. It grows lethal, this Western leisure, creature comforts of the New Age aging us before our time, skin blackening with tabloid ink, hearts growing hard. I stand in the Egyptian Antiquities Room of the...

An ordinary Sunday morning.(poem)
June 22, 1996... All Sundays tend to be a little blank. But here, without the New York Times to hide Behind, to clutter the rooms, the mind with news And make our fatuous Sundays plausible, The early stillness, sunny or sunless or ...

Film directions for the underworld. (poem)
June 22, 1996... I recall recalling Cocteau's black-and-white, surreal film of a descent into the underworld as our plane taxis above rush-hour Manhattan, which in early winter darkness is an erupting volcano with countless molten lava...

The composing room.(poem)
June 22, 1996... I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comp's floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down, as if nodding yes, from what they call their composer's sticks as they set...

Commutations (II).(poem)
June 22, 1996... Writing on the train as the city lights recede, another day's work-duty done, brings relief of a kind not easily come by, if at all, on buses. Look: with a little imagination, falling toward sleep, we are in Spain or Italy...

When I came to Cerillos and Madrid, New Mexico.(poem)
June 22, 1996... I Now is memory, meaning, wanting all in one and the still presence that will capture it, calm it, give it to you as your own. Now is the keen, burst savor of an orange flooding your mouth and still aflame ...

Radio nights.(poem)
June 22, 1996... The evening died upon the window curtains, still as a doll's breath, and night came as soft as I imagined our neighbor's breasts to be, watching her undress through the lattice next door after the light was ...

A political vision.(poem)
June 22, 1996... A cellist in every lobby by love and law. Even men with crows for eyes stop gnawing the backs of necks; when shouldering through doors they're swathed in plaintive air. It's good for the republic. Like wine in...

Autumn.(poem)
June 22, 1996... It is autumn, and I am teaching my English class poetry And the metaphor of autumn, the metaphors of seasons, Using a couple of Millay poems to illustrate. Even as I am speaking of beginnings and endings, You are at our...

Dining alone in Ogunquit.(poem)
June 22, 1996... I wish I were Tennessee Williams Because I would know what to call the wallpaper design. I would know the name of the flowers in the yellow vase. I would order the appropriate beverage for the temperature. I would know why...

1949.(poem)
June 22, 1996... When my grandmother drove by that day In her large black car, I was surprised To see her in our neighborhood. It was A hearse, I'm sure, packed with the dead Who had not yet died, but if you live Long enough you know...

In the abiding dark.(poem)
June 22, 1996... The Devil -- had he fidelity Would be the best friend -- Because he has ability -- But Devils cannot mend -- Perfidy is the virtue That would but he resign The Devil-without question Were thoroughly...

Endlessly rocking.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Night after night I dream about my mother. How lovely her presence in that felt delineation. How alarming at first were such dreams upon awakening after years of shrugging away her every word, though now...

Vissi d'arte.(poem)
June 22, 1996... After they found her alone and cold in the thick-walled flat on rue Georges Bizet one quiet morning, wearing nothing but mascara, the black net of her hair-- after the evening papers told how her own heart had...

Kneeling virgin.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Who made this woman bending there so fair of face, the thinly lacquered, coppery skin just barely suggesting unyielding cheekbones beneath, the eyes half-closed in pain or ecstasy, the blood-colored robes so fluidly...

November birthday.(poem)
June 22, 1996... The day wheezes early to its end. The tired child, chewing giftwrap on the couch, is one. He hasn't the breath yet to snuff a cake-candle's flame. He can't count his teeth; he can't speak the old cat's name. ...

For the dead.(poem)
June 22, 1996... The memory of childhood, of stooping above the drain grate, dropping pebbles one by one between the metal bars, imagining they would never hit bottom, reminds me that you, too, have fallen away, tumbled between the...

Similarly, my sister.(poem)
June 22, 1996... A similar, mirrored self chews cashews in the midday, collects the mail, slams the car door, this after that-- until no one seems to notice, except the clerk and the mailman. To them all of it is reasonable: objects...

This life.(poem)
June 22, 1996... Each sensitive hour, every kicking day we sweep the darkness mostly outside, wanting the windows reflecting our lives to embrace a lit interior. But then the blinds are closed, moths caught between screen and window...

Very close to my world.(poem)
June 22, 1996... In the hours my heart breaks faith with me bruise is all this muscle remembers. I try to push on, but the heart will not move. Buried emptiness coursing every vein while all the shadows of my body readjust -- then ...

Accidents, hemophilia, and grace.(poem)
June 22, 1996... He tilts upward in the sudden dim silence under the bus, feeling the crumpled hood, the steering column, exposed rods and wires, all joined in a new configuration pressing gently against his clothes, the same tentative pressing, the dragging...

To comfort.(short story)
June 22, 1996... Laurie says she found me naked, in the garage, screaming. I was lying beside the garden tools and camping gear, my hands over my head, screaming. She pulled out a dusty sleeping bag to cover my body. I don't remember much. I remember...

Gorgeous.(short story)
June 22, 1996... Counted Eleven Bites on myself. Mosquitoes? Ticks? Bedbugs? On my feet, ankles, calves, thighs. Stomach, midriff, where my ribs stretched my tight skin. One on the underside of my tiny left breast. There was a fascination in it: some were...

The missing.(short story)
June 22, 1996... The ghosts of Nathan Bedford forrest and of his thirty horses have been seen prancing down Front Street on their way to the old Gayoso Hotel, which isn't there anymore, either. Forrest single-handedly charged through an entire Union brigade at...

A roof above my head.(short story)
June 22, 1996... Linda had pale blue eyes. They were always opened wide, always looked directly at you. In anyone else they would have seemed a clear sign of an honest soul, unburdened by horrible guilty secrets that had to be kept hidden. By themselves eyes...

Shifman in remission.(short story)
June 22, 1996... Shifman Reclined in his chair and idly pulled a fistful of hair off the back of his head, down at the nape of his neck. "Hey, look at this," he said, more to himself than to anyone else. "My hair's falling out. Get a load of this. The doctors...

Missing women.(short story)
June 22, 1996... Three women have vanished, a mother, her teenage daughter, and the daughter's friend -- purses and cars left behind, TV on, door unlocked. The daughter had plans to spend the day at the lake with friends and never showed. The phone has rung...

The business of mourning. (English professor's personal reflections)
June 22, 1996... One reason I like to go to academic conferences is that I can run on new roads. Runners always risk boredom, and a new road refreshes the eye, maybe even enables you to get lost. When you are healthy, when you have gone a few miles and feel...

Poetic widow. (reminiscences about George Yeats, wife of the poet Yeats)
June 22, 1996... I came to know Mrs. Yeats through Tom Parkinson, the Californian poet and critic, when Parkinson was working on the Yeats manuscripts. I think I actually guided him to her Palmerston Road house the first time he went there; those quiet, shaded...

Gentle giant. (personal reminiscences about poet Theodore Roethke)
June 22, 1996... Shortly after my first, slim volume, Forms of Exile, appeared in 1958, I got a very friendly note from Theodore Roethke, "with the admiration of an old party." His response was probably prompted by our mutual friend, the painter Morris Graves,...

Whitman's selfsong. (Walt Whitman)
June 22, 1996... "Whitman was more man than you'll ever be," said my student -- not, I trusted, meaning me personally -- "and more bitch, too." Neat as that, he had pinned down a crucial element of Whitman's character as a person and poet -- not merely his...

Tom More's love of women in "The Thanatos Syndrome."
June 22, 1996... Woman, in the self-obsessed perspective of the narrator of Walker Percy's Lancelot, is the source of the ultimate experience for a man: "There is no joy on this earth," Lancelot Andrewes Lamar assures his priest-confidant, "like falling in...