The Southern Review articles from June 2000

The Southern Review archives from June 2000

Blurbs.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... I don't want to be a national treasure, too old-codgery, something wheeled out of a closet to cut ribbon. I prefer resident genius, or for the genius to be at least undeniable. I'd like to steer away from the...

Nights in Tijuana.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... for Jack At twelve, my cousin had romantic fever, something torrid and hot like night in our imagined Tijuana where everyone fell in love. While his joints swelled and the valves of his heart gave, just...

What the Poets Could Have Been.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... If every time their minds drifted, they'd thought instead of a grocery list-- milk, eggs, shoe polish, liniment-- if they could have smelled lemon and thought of lemons, not their mother's hands, if they'd been more...

Easter in the Garden.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Sometimes I miss the long terror of The Passion, the glad exhalation Of glorious alleluias, mass At the high altar, the feast of eggs And chocolates and ham, yams, sweet peas, And gravy salty as sweat, cherry wine....

Wildebeest in the Serengeti.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Once more the lower world is becoming confused. Oh, The essence of Reason's House is confusion, So this development is like the owl becoming owlish. Arithmetic has failed to bring order to our sorrow. Newton is not...

The Dead of Shiloh.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... "A drowsy numbness pains my sense." Keats heard The nightingale cry out from the place of war. He heard the thud of the buffalo-killer's gun. The slant soul loves to play cards in the serpent's house. The crow arrived...

Inspirations.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... He's probably been rejected thousands of times and still he's undeterred, the smiling, round-faced black man who wheels his cart full of poems through the subway car and sings out: "Ladies and gentlemen, these poems...

The Blasted Tree.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Of all of them along the path that curved for twenty miles through thickest forest, it was the blasted tree I loved best. Among thousands of firs risen beyond the eye's reach, among colossal cedars with their...

The Blind Masseuse.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... After they name you, I ask you to strip. Because my face is a wall, this is no threat, and I can smile even if I've never seen what muscles at the corners of lips can do. Muscles, you see, are what I know-- the way...

Revisions.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... I stood at the top of the cut and called. Hunched on the tracks, he smiled, as if invisible in his crib, a game we'd often played. Come to me, I yelled, but already he could not hear. In the first version I leap...

The Figure in the Window.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Like my father, I stand at the table's end to teach what I know of poems. Through arched panes I see distant views of a building like my own but filled with doctors naming the subtleties of veins, the harmony...

American Ruins.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Like makeshift museums, these humble wrecks and remnants of home viewed from the road, delegates of that moment when we see clean through to the place we're falling to. I like to stop the car and walk over...

Lost.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... She hates it when she loses something deep in her pocketbook-- a key, maybe, or a lipstick, which is a thing she needs these days because her lips have gone so pale since the breakup. But the stuff down...

Steps.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... The kid is asleep when the lights go, so it ought to make no difference. But the windows rattle from thunder too deep to hear, and the clock flashes before time stops, so she wakes up, crying. My...

Old Jazz.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... After all these years she still goes to his gigs-- a gray-haired groupie, now, to that old trumpet. But by ten o'clock her chin is in her hand, and when he leans back to finger out the last second of a breath, there is just...

Intermission.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... This quarter-hour of Dammerung, houselights glowing up like embers lightly breathed on, the last song a pleasant face no one remembers; now through the foyer sexless boys circulate with paper napkins, crackers,...

The Museum of Memory.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Forgetting is the inevitable outcome of all experience. --Geoffrey Sonnabend, neurophysiologist These People, He Says, I Don't Know Passing my father photographs, I wait For the German names of lost relatives: Gottlob,...

Rejoice.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... for S. M. It's time to clear the cobwebs from our throats, and voice the simple truth (which thankfully never is) that the world's not just in orbit around the sun, but also set by an unnamed source to...

The Art of the Comics, ca. 1960.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Barbershop, Homestead Park Derelict and empty whenever we entered. He'd come from the back room, it always Seemed, as though he were being disturbed, Annoyed even, at having to spend his day Like this,...

Yellow Wildflowers.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Appearing one day from where or how I cannot say, their presence alone is evidence. How they have enhanced the field, rid of its weeds not long ago. Just now through the open window there is the smell of freshly...

Our Other Sister.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister wasn't shooting a homemade blow dart into her knee, where it dangled for a breathless second before dropping off, but telling her we had another, older sister who'd gone...

Oval Pin.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... The oval pin sits on your dresser, a gift a friend brought back from Russia: a troika painted on black lacquer. The three horses, one plunging forward, one rearing up, one looking back at the man and woman in the...

Time Smear.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Julie's driving, I'm in the passenger seat wearing holographic glasses that give the world a prismatic aura as it all speeds by, the Grateful Dead is playing on the stereo for the first time in ages, and I feel those...

The Invisible Woman Surfaces.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... 1. Now that the baby has gone to bed, I'm carving a solitude out of the tree of sleep he's perched in. With husband and older child happily packed off, I tour my thoughts like a cache of long-lost paintings...

My Father's Copy of Herzog.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... On his back, on the couch under lamplight, my father reading, head propped on a sunken pillow, at the far end of the living room braced by the picture window and the fireplace on either long wall, opposite my mother's...

The Girl in the Back Seat.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... 1. Galisteo Beside me you sit, gaze out the side window, too tired to talk. Before that summer's rains the desert light is strong, steady as Tuscan wine, no less a drug; through shifting scents of cedar, asphalt,...

Riffs.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... The mockingbird on the chimneytop lavishly riffs the world's lavish notes for the sheer loud fun of it, relishing how roundly all his mimicky triplets keep echoing down the empty column of which he is the ornate...

Autumn Shower.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... So here we are in the middle, which means repetition: seasons, seasons. In periodicals, recirculated opinions from ten, twenty years ago; recapitulated stories at family dinner tables; ...

Symptomatic.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... for D., Ohio, 1999 Overcast this morning-- as it always seems to be those nights when we (trifocaled, with binoculars) make plans to stay up late or get up very early to view some object the latest...

Calling the Code.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... I'm forty-six, and beyond a life of crises. No more foreclosures, drink or drugs, walks on the pier with the ocean calling. Even my son, who vanished atop a skateboard alleyed through the dark, rides back on a...

Wanted: Japanese Sword.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... It's one of those lighted signs you tow behind a truck. For years the man down the street has kept it in his yard-- as if a retired samurai might wander by on his way to Lund's Hardware or the Whippi Dip. Tonight, I...

Cause.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... The first time I got sober, I went sixty days, which ended in Laredo, with a woman who sold law books. It was the day the Challenger smashed into the sea. We were sitting on a deck, watching an open field ...

Coming and Going.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... There is a recently discovered order, neither sponges nor fishes, which is never at the mercy of conditions. If currents shift, these fleshy zeppelins can reverse directions from inside-- ...

It's Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... But how dark is darkest? Does it get jet--or tar-- black; does it glint and increase in hardness or turn viscous? Are there stages of darkness and chips to match against its...

Great Thoughts.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Great thoughts do not nourish small thoughts as parents do children. Like the eucalyptus, they make the soil beneath them barren. Standing in a grove of them is hideous. KAY RYAN's new...

Say Uncle.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Every day you say, Just one more try. Then another irrecoverable day slips by. You will say ankle, you will say knuckle; why won't you why won't you say uncle? KAY...

Sometimes.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... It happened yesterday: I go back to the world where your brain flooded suddenly though your heart and lungs lived three more days. Where your tongue swelled out of your mouth, and your open eyes were motionless as...

I Will.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... for Alessandra Ann Castle Harris, 1934-1996 It's the death of your memory I still cannot fathom: never in such small space such wealth. A diamond the size of your brain would be nothing to it. And the end of your...

The Hermit Thrush.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... Along the line of dawn a hermit thrush sings down summer dark. Breeze stirring oak leaves brings a sweet odor of stargazer lilies through our screen, and now light begins to find the room. Eyes shut, I see the...

The Mysteries.(Poem)
June 22, 2000... What you look hard at seems to look hard at you --Gerard Manley Hopkins I. My reflection hangs on nothingness, a faded ghost inside the window-glass, or rather outside, hovering twenty stories over Chicago, among...

For a Living.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... WHEN SUSAN SEES DANIEL ON TELEVISION, wearing a brown suit and standing in front of a weather map of her state, the first thing she thinks is that you can't tell he's short. Then she thinks of all the women in Tucson, eating dinner with their...

Jolie-Gray.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... THE REAL REASON JOLIE-GRAY BOISSENEAU has come up to New Orleans to stay with the Marshes on Esplanade Avenue--her father, Gray, calls them "your mother's high-and-mighty relations"--is that nobody down in Grand Isle can stand her. The...

In Vienna, in Glass.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... WHEN I SAW HIM IN VIENNA, his eyes gave both of us away. Tiny nuggets of blue fire spread through the pale gray made Patrick Farrell's eyes appear unnaturally alert, or wary. Even when he spoke to you directly, he had always looked preoccupied,...

Melba Kuperchmid Returns.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... MELBA KUPERCHMID WAS A BEAUTIFUL ONE, and everybody knows what happens to the beautiful ones. Scooped up and gone before she turned twenty. He was a traveler; nobody even knew his name or what he did for a living, only that he had daring and...

The Next Life.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... THE GRAY-SKINNED COUPLE smoking cigarettes ask for two beers and two cups of tea. I give them what they want. It's my first night. I got this job by saying I had been a waitress at a truck stop. If I had known how readily a lie can take the...

Deranged by Desire.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... ONE DAY IN THAT LONG, SOMETIMES COLD, sometimes warm spring of 1924, feeling desperate, Moses Rosen the pawnbroker and amateur violinist, age thirty-five, went to the cemetery to talk to his uncle. Lasting love eluded him, it seemed, but desire...

Saved from Blazes.(Short Story)
June 22, 2000... TONY WAS A FIREMAN; he'd wanted to be a fireman since he was a little boy. He was twenty-four now; maybe he'd wanted to be a fireman for twenty years. He was happy because his dreams had come true; he'd been a fireman now for six years. He...

Rabbit Reread.
June 22, 2000... FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1950, AMERICANS are leaving a decade behind without the company of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, John Updike's fictional Toyota dealer and former high-school basketball star. Not only is Rabbit dead, he's been ceremonially...

In Search of a Foot.
June 22, 2000... IN 1917, T. S. ELIOT, who had been in London and Paris for several years and had observed the opening salvos of Imagist theory with a more experienced eye than most of the campaigners, published "Reflections on Vers Libre" in The New Statesman....