The Southern Review articles from June 1999

The Southern Review archives from June 1999

Curing Time.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Stringing tobacco--August 1924, hot and humid Her muslin shift clung to her, wet and close as the mist that had been burned off the creek's back an hour ago. The ground-pulling was done, and the heavy dew gone from the...

After the Hurricane.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... The hurricane tipped oaks over in ranks along our ridge above the river. Branches caged us. Stumbling inside a pine crown, my wife bruised her arm on a broken limb. "I'll go home and ice it," she whispered. Watching...

The Wizard of Oz.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Boiling up with smoke like the Wizard of Oz against his curtain he appeared in Pearl Harbor air, his jaunty fedora and cigarette holder burning bush to our woundedness. Father in a wheelchair, he bore the burden of us,...

Sonata at Payne Hollow.(Play)
June 22, 1999... The kentucky shore of the Ohio at evening. Some time in the future, perhaps a saner time than now. It is the season when the toads mate and sing from the stones along the water's edge at night. Here the river has curved in close to the foot of...

The Fisherman and the Little Fish.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... after Aesop Calm water and the boat pushing out across a gray skin of shadow.... Cast after cast, he reeled the gold spoon through the cove, then the red spinner with the rooster tail, the flat-headed jelly worms ...

My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... When I sat for a moment in the bleachers of the lower school gym to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter's kindergarten climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit, I remembered my sweet, exasperated mother ...

The Family Parade.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... 1 Sparks off the sequins of majorettes, off sun-flaked tiaras and the blurred propellers of fire batons dragging that off-key glare of French horn and tuba, cornet, trumpet, trombone. I edge through the stench ...

Massage.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... A baby squirrel dragged in by the cat, the only movement breath forcing itself to the deepest part of his torso, a soft pulse my massage therapist wrapped in towels laid in a cardboard box with perfectly round air...

Summer Small Talk.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Alter Rain Spiders rain has given away your secrets-- little death stars little abattoirs the flies zip past Insect Invisible to the Eye In summer grasses the click-click of small ...

The Drop.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... We taped it under the seats, packed it into the door panels, drove it over the mountains in July, and the other two hadn't a word of the language, not a word, not help, not food, and always that fear of the sirens and...

The Pallace of Memoria Garnished with Perpetuall Shininge Glorious Lightes Innumerable.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... It's shut. And after such a climb! A caustic drizzle slicks the abandoned funicular railway as the lights come on below in the abandoned weekend. The distant band's just tuning up in the life you missed. Your beloved dead...

proof.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Proposed: That the electrode lies as it sparks the scent of Vicks from the cortex; and the bedroom's fevered wallpaper strafed by headlights, the rain, the tires' hiss through rain, the rain smell --you are eight--all, all...

Raccoon.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... I saw him a little before dawn in the dense growth of the daylilies and ferns at the far back of the garden against the fence, creeping along the fence, small shadow, stopping, peering about, casting about,...

Poem to My Heart in Early Spring.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... I'm assured all this will be in no time a speck in my memory. That I'll understand, at last I'll understand-- but this spring, knee-deep in my garden, I'm angry at nothing and no one but my own heart--...

Love.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Lorraine might be in the other room writing songs. On weekends she played at a bar where she waitressed. Raymond had been in Vietnam, with Vietnamese women. And now he loved Lorraine, who hated him because he was poor ...

Picnic.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... There was a clearing of yellow grass where a deer ran. The air was still, and I remember the loudness of my pack's zipper when I opened it for cloth and bread and a knife. A blind of leaves hung from the apple tree. And...

First Time.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... On Sunday I was in an upstairs bedroom on the bed, being forced. I saw us on the face of the mirror, the dune of our white flesh. Afterwards, I looked out through the window, where it was summer. The sky was cloudless,...

Landscapes Before Surgery.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... In the most remote, junglelike corner of the island there is the cabin, made of mint, where we lived. Past all the alley-rows of papayas, beyond the shed, and tools with teeth. If they want to see more deeply in, ...

Tea.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... My love for him? It was like the stone I saw the cashier wearing once. On a braided rope. And like the flight pattern of monarchs over a dune of yellow grass. It was a fan in summer. And it was like a piece of gravel...

Encounter.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... It was dawn, and there was still blood on the earth, on the grass, where the calf had been born. Its mother was moored behind it. I looked at them both for a long time because their eyes were like small flats of stone....

Figure and Ground.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... In the summer I walked a trail, trying to accept things as they are. Living among the small things. For six weeks there was no rain; I took in the bright fields, then the languid creek where two herons lifted over the water...

Retreat.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Monk says they were moved here from France-- grave markers jumbled together like a yard sale. One's a squiggle of iron, another imbedded with glass. The fanciest sits on a diagonal, curvaceous, like a perfume bottle. Salmon...

The Cure.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... She bled for twelve years, enough for twelve women, paid at least that many physicians. So when he appeared, believers packed tightly as a school of fish, she laid down her basket and stared. He was...

Crossing Myself.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Shyly at first, along with the street faithful staring at a boy and his crushed bicycle. Or in courtesy, a tidy one after grace and before I ate, a bit of restraint, quick-release. Lately I've tried it long and...

A Bad Year.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... We call it a bad year, diseases of the blood, fragile organs, the bone gone awry-- not even the face left simply to age. Things have to change, we can't go on like this! one of us says over Chambolle-Musigny and...

Real Estate.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... No stream ran through the twenty-seven acres, but the approach had at every turn the listed twenty-foot boulders, and at the top a view looking north over the peaks enclosing the summer-dressed valley. The house was...

Foreseeable Futures.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... for Bill We would have found Powell in Paris had we been there in the sixties, a damp club off Saint-Germain, hot, filled with the blue smoke of Gauloise and the female scents of jasmine and champac. The small,...

Zeno's Lemur.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Isn't he the man with crimson socks and the slow loris climbing like the hour hand from his shoulder, over his ear and up to the pale dome of his head? The man's face shines with affection. He's an honest man,...

Moon over Squibnocket.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... A hundred yards out The Rockpile shelters the keeper bass. They rise from the bottom with the moon over Squibnocket to feed on chum fish. The boats out there now pleasure boats, boats of solitaries--captains casting through...

Infestation.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Even insects have histories, but they're not interesting histories. --Lord Alfred Whitehead Soberly the exterminator says, Dampness brings the spiders in, through windows, under doors, on the air.... I don't mind...

Naming Red.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Festival of Lights, Kathmandu, and the women wore blouses in reds I'd never seen. Crimson, magenta, the words are wrong. Back home I find myself reading the sides of Crayolas, watercolor tubes: ocher, the cadmiums, ...

Under the Oaks at Holmes Hall, Overtaken by Rain.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... A desert downpour in early spring, and I'm standing under California oaks, gazing through rain as the gray sky thunders. I don't know why the nightingale sings to Kubla Khan and not to me, nineteen and marked by...

Danger.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... A thunderhead boils up overhead in greenish gray and hovers, waiting for the signal cell that says to funnel down or not, stop our hearts with battery-radio reports basemented in the dark. The houseguest retrieves a...

We Take Our Children to Ireland.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... What will they remember best? The barbed wire still looped around the Belfast airport, the building-high Ulster murals-- but those were fleeting, car-window sights; more likely the turf fires lit each night, the cups...

Apparition.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... What was it penance for, this burbling out of the yard at dawn billions of newly sprung, flung-up cicadas? And what steered the commentators past the obvious theme (out of Moses' dream came the mandibles of grief ...

Work.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... 1. I am a woman sixty years old and of no special courage. Every day--a little conversation with God, or his envoy the tall pine, or the grass-swimming cricket. Every day--I study the difference between water and stone. ...

Adagio, Ma Non Troppo.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Golden-throated birds, their ripe warbling fluid as the new oil pressed from the olives, welcome dawn to my neighbors' courtyard by scrabbling through a plastic sack of trash. Giving the junk a picking-over, they uncover ...

The Mind Descending from Above.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... What have they to do with love's bleakest shapes, these radiantly formed and tinted tropic fish pouting, flirting, veiling themselves with pleated fans, artfully poised as end-of-season debutantes? The question might never...

Movie.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... for David Wyatt Days I drove those distances it was night most of the time, the great highway dark the dark around the dials, new snow star-like on the thick black ice, ice starlit on the mountains, and the towns, the...

Cardinal.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... 1 Against the green the line in red the eye makes in order to keep up, the thing least visible the moment you see it. The afterimaging the way you hear it too, two or three in sequence or at once, as if when ...

Extravagant Love.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Irritated and sometimes utterly through With it all, they've wound up in the hushed stacks Of Last-Will-and-Word, having turned the zoo Of self so inside-out they've settled back To elements as gritty as Birmingham And...

Yes.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... You know, when I'm sixteen I'm going to ride a motorcycle, swim in the deep end, and have jiggly breasts. --Carolyn Ramseur, age three Always to see the world made whole, Though that is just the thing it will not be-- The...

Odi et amo.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and I love. And if you should ask how I can do both, I couldn't say; but I feel it, and it shivers me. --trans. Charles Martin...

Near the terrace.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Allegory is the only way is conclusion. Dubious with the growing grass I miss you. You turned out to be long past the event. Facile with hands and no patience. Each geranium lent itself to the morning I cut them. The...

On the playing field.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... In the vicinity of a scar I never saw before. Before you left I never noticed. The weather in California the natives insist is there. The importance of baseball or "all the lost objects on the moon" rising over Mt....

Conjunctions of morning glories.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Lists of conjunctions, a leg, a gluey bit. Someone on top while we waited for his wife. In the novel they fixed the lock first. Discrete observations: morning glories and what to get, what to get first. What I...

A Near Relation.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... For months after it happened my brother sent gifts packed in huge quantities of bailed-up paper and plastic pellets, as if the packing itself was emblem of the encapsulating and preservationist feelings he bore me, or...

Offended Parties.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... I wake at first light, my mind running fast. Always a dispute, some area of wretchedness calling for attention, lately, after her phone call, my ex-wife's and my failure to make it ten years as a couple. I don't know why my...

Star.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... When as now I am defeated by love and growing more surly about it, when my friends have decided it is time to take me aside and counsel me, then I find myself speaking quietly to myself, a man edging toward a leafy patch ...

October.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... All summer, longing for his winter sleep, stretching and upright, chewing berries, thinks of no chewing, no lookout for trouble, any species. Sun's--hot. Breeze--dries the eyes. The stream fibs, telling rainbows....

How to Live in a Trap.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... First, drag yourself and that whole thing down to a waterhole, under some hastate leaves, if possible. They'll also serve as ambush for food-gathering if you use skill, keep your pain quiet, and don't...

North American Bear.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Early November in the soul, a hard rain, and dusky gold From the trees, late afternoon Squint-light and heavy heart-weight. It's always downleaf and dim. A sixty-two-year-old, fallow-voiced, night-leaning man, I...

Theories of Rain.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... Kingsessing, on the Schuylkill September 8, 1810 HE RODE PAST EARLIER, that slip of a Sophie at his side James. If you knew what I feel when I see him... but why shouldn't you know? If I can imagine you, not your face or your gestures...

Last Scenes from Single Life.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... The Nephew JAMES HAS ONE NEPHEW, Mark James. He is eight. James's brother, Trevor, married a Parisian. Every summer before her death they vacationed in Cahors, where Joelle's parents have a large stone house in a field of cherry trees. We...

The Funeral Side.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... ON HER FIRST NIGHT HOME in two years, Sandra McCain slept in her mother's old sewing room. Her own room had been filled with furniture from the store downstairs. One side of the first floor was McCain's Furniture, and the other side was...

Gray's Anatomy.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... I "ALL I EVER DID was almost invent nylon," I was saying to somebody at one of the wakes. I was drunk, of course. "But sheesh. These guys. Shamus figured how to get the seven dwarves to go to work. And Ray, he kept us warm, gave us those...

At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... I HAVE COME MORE AND MORE TO BELIEVE in the validity of first impressions. All or almost all of the personalities involved is contained in that first instant, I think, though we don't always bother to read the entire message. Once a man came to...

Melville and the Lyric of History.(Herman Melville)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1999... TO LITERARY HISTORY, Herman Melville (1819-1891) is above all the author of Moby-Dick and other novels. His arresting and wholly original poetry, written between 1850 and 1890, is visibly a product of the same mind that produced the greatest...

Hemingway at Fifty.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1999... I SPENT LAST SUMMER reading Hemingway again. He was turning ninety-nine, and I was turning fifty. Age is in many ways the subject of his story. How long, he everywhere asks, can a good thing last? One answer, given in "The Three-Day Blow," is...

When Is a Story More Than a Story? A Fiction Chronicle.(Review)
June 22, 1999... TWO NEW WORKS OF FICTION--Ehud Havazelet's Like Never Before and Avery Chenoweth's Wingtips-depict the lives of American families through a series of interrelated but freestanding short stories, and in each case the final effect is more than...

Old Masters.(Review)
June 22, 1999... BECAUSE PHILIP LEVINE'S POETRY helped me define, and then accept, my working-class origins, I have loved his work above that of all others. Levine's poetry, for a young white woman emerging from the racist South of the 1950s, depressed by its...

Behind the Lines.(Review)
June 22, 1999... IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, two movements have appeared in American poetry that seem to academics who follow the poetic stock market promising areas in which to invest time and energy. Both are reactions against the informality of idiom and meter...