The Southern Review articles from June 2001

The Southern Review archives from June 2001

The June My Greek Grandmother Lay Dying in a Queens Hospital.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... my brothers, our lovers, and I sat on the terrace on Serifos, calling out to the owls, calling out Who? Who? Who? pushing out the air and O of mystery from our throats, then swallowing potent island wine, slightly sweet ...

Room of the Orphans, 1947.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... After my father's suicide, Marti, my Mexican stepmother, went back to the iron bed with her mother Rebeca, a Sephardi from Constantinople, who normally called me mancebito, young man (in medieval...

Night One.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... In our life-watch we are down to five or six Pierre Grange watches, a jeweler's box o[ soft Swiss straps, and a few precious stones that we are selling off to pay the Greystone Hotel bill and our meals....

The Hunchback Dancers.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Carnations and chrysanthemums nod Like the children weary Of beery kisses and dances With plump, red-lipped aunts. A hunchback in brown wool suit Dances with his wife, hunchback too. They dip and wheel and...

Investing the Moment with Metaphysical Significance.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Walking a road all dust and stone, One hot afternoon I chanced upon A field of black angus, twelve head. As I drew near they turned to me, Expectantly, chewing their sweet grass, Appraising me with woeful eyes. ...

A Siege of Mirrors.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... 1. Father, you wear this dark halo, this frame Bolted to your skull, a fullback's shoulder pads, And from your bed you say you wish you were dead, That you'd be better off dead. As dead You almost were, backing onto...

Signs and Wonders.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... I'm not entirely in favor of summer, what with its drop-dead heat, its shallow, unbothered air of fullness beyond ending or enduring. Sure, I like to see half the world disappear behind this velvet green...

Robins.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Strange, it was, on a mountain deck that looked toward Byers Peak, to peel aside a mat and gaze down at the robins perching just below--four hungry, chirping young ones nestled on a post, their cherry mouths agape;...

Sunset.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... "What a glorious sunset!" say my visitors as cumulus, amassed in mesa shapes above the river, glow, striated pink, vermilion, crimson, crowned with cirrus tinted gold. "And there--below the bridge--those embers..." Friends...

On Her Sixty-sixth Birthday.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... This measure is an artifice, and still old time surrounds me, running as it will, the waters deeper now, the current slow, but bearing my becoming in its flow. A moment's pause, and what began as dream inhabits its...

Shall I Compare Thee?(Poem)
June 22, 2001... According to early Icelandic law it was a serious offense to address a love poem to a woman, even an unmarried one. Love prefers the least contact to the greatest distant joy. If I loved the moon I would not...

The Old Orchard.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Littleton Long Apples hang ripe on his trees, and surely light that falls between branches casting shadows of leaves on the very green grass is almost the same light that fell there in other years. At least...

Remembrance.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Was it ripe figs split glistening on the plate in sunlight, or the way her bare hips rounded in the shadow of a tree? Did the body run and run through open fields until he rolled in high grass and lay waiting for light...

Hunter's Moon.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... My father and mother are scattered across water, and moon is so close my palm could touch it as geese wedge their way to places I will never go. Why in this dawn do they fly without sound, mute passage through...

The Broken Narratives.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... 1. Picture this: It's summer, it's sultry, everyone who is anyone in love and young in this small, country place knows where to park, come darkness, beyond town in the tall grass of a field, with no drive-in movie screen...

At Cuirt in Galway.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Seamus Heaney The tide race is crazy today, passing itself out In a mad rush between river and sea, Running rings around streets and traffic, Revving over weirs, flat out under bridges. Where it calms a bit,...

Hawk.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Over Annaghmakerrig a hawk's wings Caught winter sunlight above the trees. Between the woods the fields were blank With snow. The hawk quartered the ground. Back in my room the lamplit page Spread white before me....

The Widowed Bride's Lament.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... A translation of Caoineadh Liam Ui Raghallaigh Do you remember it still, that day The village was alive with horsemen And there were clergy of every rank All gathering for my marriage? The fiddle was played at table ...

Recovery.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Alan Shapiro First it's afternoon, and the phone rings and she answers to hear that she has cancer, where an hour ago we sat, mother and son, before the window, looking out at fallen leaves as they rustled away....

Promissory Notes.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... She takes in the road her daddy drove and brakes around the hairpin turn where his deuce coupe at last lost control. From the pickup's front seat, she shudders at what her headlights pass over, the stretch of broken lines...

A Simple Plan.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Weeks before she took her life, her thoughts were of it. Often she would ask me to picture an afternoon in autumn, the hour softening toward evening. The end of a day when a husband and wife have time to veil their...

Far from the Eye of Heaven.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... The skin divers found him in a car at the bottom of a lake. Such a quiet kid, mole-faced, skinny, hair of salt, cousin Saul who walked nights alone on an L.A. beach. A teenager without a girlfriend, a gang, a job....

The Thawing of the Iceman.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... In Bolzano, on a slab in a gleaming lab at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, the great Iceman of the Alps is thawing, traveling slowly back to soft, a state he's not visited for 5,300 years, when the avalanche...

Ghazal of Eros.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Round up all the devilish, horny men who love women, and you get a herd of jerks ready to be saved through love, women. They gather at the roadhouse to get drunk and howl along to the jukebox, country songs sobbing about...

Aesop Revisited.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... We know how the body thrives on jostling: jogging up escalators, answering two phones at once, interrupting the stockbroker with a card trick, partying in lofts, making love in fast taxis. The soul, we know, binges...

The Bird Collection at the Everhart Museum.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Driving home from the antique shop, my acquisitive thrill wears off, and I realize I've paid cash for another weird piece of Victoriana: a moth-chewed hummingbird domed under blown glass. Now I'll have to clear a...

Never Again.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... The Year Before My Last Child Was Born When I slapped my son in the butcher shop, When he whined or wiggled or reached to touch The warned against, the butcher trimmed and trimmed Until the porterhouse was lean enough ...

Tree Kangaroo.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Dendrolagus goodfellowi Within the cramped enclosure, its clutch of low plantings meant to hint at native Papuan range--some upland density--she hunkers, nose to paws, on a bare wood plank mounted above the humble...

Moon Jellyfish.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Aurelia aurita No planet could keep so many moons in tow. They drift, constantly unconstellating around you in their milky way. Even to want to cradle one in your palm would compromise their elegance: The opaque...

Lobster-Claws.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Heliconia bihai The gift at my door held me a moment in windless heat, as if the tropics had honed those red pendant-stemmed bracts into claws, but when I slid the card from its sheath, I felt the cold advance and...

Flotation Devices.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Odd studies cross my desk: today, fish bladders. Gas-filled, they hold a fish at stable depth; they rupture if the fish is hauled up fast; despite its fight it is already dying. How grotesque it is, when good things are...

Dearborn North Apartments.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Chicago, Illinois Rows of rectangles rise, set into brick. And in every rectangle, there is a lamp. Why should there be a lamp in every window? Because in all this wide city, there is not enough light. Because the...

Dogwood, December.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... For Peter Behr, 1915-1997 We notice not going but absence. And therefore, looking through the window at the framed tree, for the first time we see its bones, and understand that the night brought flurries,...

Four Days Late, Twenty Minutes Early.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Morning rain. Small applause on the car's roof. We waited outside the drugstore and watched droplet after droplet swim down the windshield, their tails wagging like sperm. I never wanted to be a father, and my love ...

Sex and Death.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Always the same two themes pushing through the revolving door of the page or canvas: O'Keeffe's skulls and vaginal irises, petals engorged and flaming crimson. It's the story of the teenagers walking their libidos ...

Appointment.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... The leather couch like a beached whale. On the wall a clock grinds its teeth. My psychiatrist clamps his skull with his hand and says, If you don't mind, I'd like to cut this session short. I've got a terrible headache. ...

Searching Black Amethyst.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Look for the phoenix, the phalanx, the reverse peacock and wild-rose pattern, for elegant Depression-era glass from Paden City, West Virginia, from a time before. Look only for etched black, an ornate art nouveau design. ...

For Laurie.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... We shall afford our costly seasons; There is a gentleness survives That will outspeak and has its reasons. --W. D. Snodgrass, "April Inventory" New to the Upland South, I used to miss the day each year the city...

A Border State Celebrates the Fourth of July.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Bruce Springsteen's melody is playing in heavy-bass Muzak about our hometowns while a little blond boy in line behind me stands with his head slumped over a grocery cart. I scrutinize his parents, wishing I could tell who...

After the East Rosebud Fires.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Are even the field stones charred, the rugged sienna clay on the road, the white rocks along the creekbed, are they darkened like snow in a late urban winter? Can a part of the past be torched, just like that, by a...

First Year of My Mother's Dementia.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... I opened the door and flicked on the lights just as the deer seemed about to leap back into the dark. Startled, he stood by the clay urn he'd just overturned, dirt and shards heaped near his strict feet. His right leg...

When I Open My Mother.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... I meant to write When I open my mouth, but instead it came out When I open my mother, and now I can feel my breath move to the side, like a body, or like eyes deciding not to see. I force myself to look out...

"Service Is Our Business".(Poem)
June 22, 2001... It used to be black as the insides of a Pennzoil can whenever we drove this ten-mile stretch of Highway 25 at night from lit-up Asheville back to our dark house in Arden, no stoplights or streetlights anywhere, nothing. ...

Yellow Jackets.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Their nest's a bullet hole drilled into grassy dirt that I never notice till it's way too late and I've passed over it and those pissed terrorists hit me hard from behind, again and again, their beelines of...

Whistling.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... You just put your lips together and blow. --Lauren Bacall "In heaven," my Jesuit professor would say, "the angels may perform Bach in concert, but in private they always whistle Mozart!" And then he'd pucker up...

Les Nympheas.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... They were there from the beginning, just emerging from the canvas in the shape of sunlight dappled on the white skirt of a woman's dress, masses of color in a garden, whorls of light on the face of the sea. Finally, they...

July, above Healdsburg.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Outrage of the jays. Sound of tree trimmers on the county road, cutting branches for the power lines. Now and then, a peacock screams. A small airplane plows the sky. Lying on my back in leaf mold, looking up at layered...

Note to the Near World.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Frank Drove around the Mission and South of Market, listening to Leonard Cohen and thinking how much you would have loved the day, filled as it was with the fumes of poppies, smells of Mexican food, messages from...

Song Overheard in a Field.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Softly, softly, the long grass sings: "Someone's listening to our song-- let them have it tonight as they go off in the fog to their warm white beds or the cold hard ground. They will learn to sing our song as the...

Making Gyotaku.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... In Osaka, fishermen have no use for the brag, the frantic gestures of length, blocks of air between their hands. They flatten their catch halfway into a tray of sand, steady the slick prize, The nervous quiver of...

Whippoorwill.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... The night Silas Broughton died, neighbors at his bedside heard a dirge rising from high limbs in the nearby woods, and thought come dawn the whippoorwill's song would end, one life given wing requiem enough, were...

Madison County: 1934.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... He knew what it could not be: stray dog or fox, on the straw no spray of blood and feather, no yellow slobber of yolk, the few eggs stolen small loss but loss enough in hard times when springhouse shelves too...

Charley Starnes.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... After the woods a sudden swoon of light in a clearing, and I am where I was then, that summer morning I brought food to Charley Startles, who drank rotgut whiskey so he might douse the memory of gas that...

The Ark.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... She's so well-built, so trim, that any wind blows her gently. Despite the warped world, she weathers the wickedness of pimps and undertakers, steering by her constellated virtues her living cargo through the roughest seas...

The Lesson.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Fuck you, luck me, I could have said to all my teachers. But I was meek as a caterpillar falling out of a tree. It clung to the spool of its own being, a raveling from its gut. When I had mercy for my teachers, they...

The Writing on the Wall.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... To Alan When the book returned to me from the paralyzed hand, when it brought back nothing to me, I did not need to read its shaking script like the handwriting of an ailing God scribbling on an already ruined ...

Gordian Knot.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... In the groin of my infant son, twin hernias, each the heft of a small stone, caught in the fists of his abdomen, made him howl in Toledo. We raced from the villa, down the mountain toward the picturesque view, through...

St. John of the Cross.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... He is not here in Fontiveros, Spanish Nebraska of his birth. The red brick granary fills with nothing but wheat, and the empty plaza has forgotten the name of Juan de Yepes, grandson of Jews, though it contains a statue ...

The Flask.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Behind glass in my daughter's dining room, the cracked leather flaps of my father's flask dangled from its shoulders like unfastened suspenders. By candlelight I saw the oval sixty-year-old stain still centered on its plaid...

A Cone of the Eucalyptus.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Mark Solomon So many piled beneath the peeling tree it seems a late, polluted hail had come, some post-biblical, antediluvian plague that fell and fell and blotted out the sun and would not melt, but scattered like...

Human.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Omo Dei Dante, spurred by divine love, saw the letter M in the human face, sockets of the penitent hollowed to a script that marked the Maker's signature, and praised it, sky-written emblem of the just, as he...

Taps.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... The sun is almost down and except for the woman dressed in white, shading her eyes with one hand waving with the other, the far shore of Whitefish Lake has turned an otherworldly deep...

Crippled Heron.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... He's lost his right foot at the ankle somehow and now he limps monomaniacally intense as fierce-eyed Ahab up and down the beach all day on his sticklike stump looking for handouts--...

Heron.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... That drought summer the lake hung low. Once-sunken stumps hugged their shadows as we watched a heron, across the water, articulate itself in grave, measured strides, to where a turtle slept on a log. The heron bowed ...

Allie's Girl.(Short Story)
June 22, 2001... AT FORTY-TWO, OUT OF ALL his college buddies--except Peter, who'd discovered he was gay around the time he discovered contradancing, and another guy who'd suffered a head injury a few years after graduation (a loose flowerbox crashing,...

Capacity.(Short Story)
June 22, 2001... SHE WAS THEIR YOUNGEST, late born, and by the time she was eleven, the house was deep in spooky old-age quiet. She had tender breasts already and My God, what look like hips, said the Shapiro aunts, turning her around in the kitchen. Her mother...

Toys R Us.(Short Story)
June 22, 2001... HARRY'S LONDON FRIENDS--toy manufacturers, dealers, importers--had insisted on complimenting him for a shrewdness he knew he didn't have, for holding out until the offer for his modest business had climbed to an immodest seven million dollars....

Ruskin, Venice, and the Fate of Beauty.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... IN THE POSTSCRIPT OF THE PREFACE to his translation of The Bible of Amiens, Proust brings forward a consideration of Ruskin that, if true, would reduce our appreciation of his work. He quotes from The Stones of Venice the passage that comes...

Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot by Denis Donoghue. New Haven: Yale University Press. $26.95 (cloth). WORDS ALONE IS (by my count, but it may come short) Denis Donoghue's nineteenth volume of literary criticism; it is also, I think, his...

Bat Ode.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Bat Ode by Jeredith Merrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press $15.00 (paper) JEREDITH MERRIN'S SECOND COLLECTION of poems, Bat Ode, offers an honest and witty look at life's middle range of experience, its betweenness. Characters and...