The Southern Review articles from June 2004

The Southern Review archives from June 2004

Violets for Manet.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Violets for Manet Not only the fan, and the woman in the long dress unfolding in liquid intervals, but the small blue flowers tied together at the waist. The sound of someone returning in the dark, the mouth...

The Corner.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... The Corner Sometimes when the dying starts, there comes a time-- a day, half hour, three fifteen one afternoon-- before the breathing slows, and stops, then starts again, like after a long...

Indian River Inlet.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Indian River Inlet March: nothing here but a blank Tinkertoy city of docks, and one revved-up loon piercing the watery center with its sharp, ancient beak. All alone, it locks and unlocks the depths. I remember to think...

Through Security.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Through Security I take off my boots because of their steel shanks. I take out my orthotics, place my coat and purse in the bin, place my carry-on on the belt. I take off my shirt, my jeans, my bra. I take out my contacts....

Makeup Regimen.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Makeup Regimen I've developed complicated pores; I need radiance, more beauty steps, more ice-colored bottles, the old me exfoliated so the young one can emerge dewy, daily. As if I could see my own face,...

Confessions of the Natural World.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Confessions of the Natural World It is winter and likely that spring will mean war. Though not here, though who knows what will happen now. Each day we read the faces of refugees in the news-- the rescued...

The Wife of Job.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... The Wife of Job Well, now, I never heard the whirlwind speak to me--though I did lose my children to a windstorm, saw the lightning's sleek flame have its way, scorching the servants and the...

In the Orchards of Science.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... In the Orchards of Science for Dafydd Wood If knowledge increases unreality, then what have we here? These are not the orchards that Berkeley might have dreamt up, some mirage...

World Enough.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... World Enough Swifter than a weaver's shuttle, time unspools its hours in glistening threads and rapturous polychromes--in the arc of leaf or feather toward the pools of that deep shade to which the...

Quiet.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Quiet Because we're reading a didactic children's novel replete with exhortations to "Notice your surroundings!" I instruct my class, "Write down what you saw today on the way to school. Street names, the name of the deli...

Poetry Lesson.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Poetry Lesson 1. Yes, the poet does say the same thing over and over. I wonder why. When do you repeat yourself? Renee? "Every day." Yes, and when in conversation? Madeleine. "When I need to remember." Raise your...

Our Mother.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Our Mother At what moment Mort entered the molecules and triggered the fanatic cells to race ahead at the speed of night, breaking the rules, surprising the constitution, overwhelming the regular cells' pace, ...

For Annie, Who Worries We're Writing the Same Poem.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... For Annie, Who Worries We're Writing the Same Poem Before I'd swallowed the gastroscopy tube (thicker than I'd imagined) you'd already started writing, getting down the shriek that greeted us near the hospital door. ...

Giving Thanks.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Giving Thanks The abandoned railway runs through gorse and boglands as we walk from our house to Caiseal na gCorr. No tracks remain, but the old ghost line's still supported by stone...

Long & the Short.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Long & the Short Shadows of clouds shade the sides of mountains rising from the desert horizon I am driving toward to see you. I stop to savor how I long to get there, stopping short to write down the distance...

Beakman's Bacteria Farm.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Beakman's Bacteria Farm Petri, we read, invented these flat, lidded dishes In order to culture creatures teeming as angels On the head of a pin. We're to fill them each with gelatin swabbed With germs we've...

Gallery Guide.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Gallery Guide LIGHT! The Industrial Age, 1750-1900 Art and Science, Technology and Society 1. Orrery with Tellurian and Lunarium, ca. 1765 It looks like...

Crusoe in Homestead.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Crusoe in Homestead Estate of Joanne Carr to Toth Holdings Inc., 328 E. 16th Ave., $20,000 --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette All week I've been railing against Crusoe, For...

Daddy, who is to say you have flown too far?(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Daddy, who is to say you have flown too far? You can't be seen anymore behind the moon's extravaganza You are somewhere they haven't named yet but I think it does have a name, maybe Dark Sky Mountain, the one you started...

In the Playroom.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... In the Playroom 1. My mother must have wanted more dolls when she was little. I had at least a dozen. Whenever my mother tucked a new doll in the doll bed she was glad she had a daughter. 2. ...

Blue Window.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Blue Window 1. On the morning my granddaughter appeared in the world, I was washing windows, broad sweeps of sky clearing, a plane passing under my paper towel and disappearing, dissolved in the pink...

Anything You Say.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Anything You Say Have you been working? Oh yes, I've been staring out my study window for quite some time now, and with this reward: a northern oriole perched on a dangling branch of the silver maple, its breast as orange...

Long Distance.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Long Distance for Rex Wilder Compressing a year of absence into the capsule of the afternoon, we followed the path through the hilltop garden, stopping at the invented...

Tourists in Cefalu.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Tourists in Cefalu Below the looming skull of stone, sea breaks, three shades of blue, and we've been dazed by a cathedral's dome, that gold mosaic Christ, so cool, inclusive, arms embracing all of Sicily's...

Transition.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Transition (With a nod to G. M. Hopkins) It is as if they know their time is short, so this September evening the crickets and peepers, giving it their all, sing to the start ...

Fire at Midsummer.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Fire at Midsummer Even our names for the cows who gave us calves for sale and slaughter, who gave us milk and cream and butter, who quit mooing soon enough when we weaned their calves away from them-- even our names...

Keep and Give Away.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Keep and Give Away What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes. --Samuel Beckett With a bushel basket...

Breath.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Breath ... to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. --Walt Whitman Early that last morning when I...

On Mallorca.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... On Mallorca Nothing will ever be the same, they said, and it is true. Even on a beach in Mallorca, far from my country, I see the towers falling and the smoke still rising from Manhattan. It is true. Even on a beach...

Seven.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Seven after Bosch Admittedly, they'll kill what only life can give, that faded haunting from another time which then we generously called the soul, but in reality ...

Ballade of the Easy Broads.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Ballade of the Easy Broads after Villon Tell me where, in what barroom or strip joint, Can I find Angele again, batons aflame Twenty feet high, or her cousin Tina ...

Victor Talking Machine Co.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Victor Talking Machine Co. I turn the old Victrola's crank until the inner spring's wound tight, about to snap, then swing the chrome-plated arm shaped like a muzzle--loading pistol ...

Congress of Freaks with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey (Combined) Circus, Season--1929.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Congress of Freaks with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey (Combined) Circus, Season--1929 Can there be anything more American than this rare sepia print, a large-format-camera panorama ...

Pitching in the Aggie.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Pitching in the Aggie He'd close one eye and squint the other, lean his cheek to the alley dirt, then rise and consider the light, the wind before doing it all again, the marble balanced, snug,...

A Room for Jesus.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... A Room for Jesus Each of us has a room inside for Jesus, Sister Angelica hissed during that heavenly blue Catechism lesson, turning to draw the castle with turrets her faith had built, block...

Easter Bunny.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Easter Bunny Children also were randomly killed. I chased the news, needing and failing to learn the opposite: no mother was dismembered while her child watched, no one set a child on fire before her parent's eyes. ...

James McNeill Whistler at St. Ives, 1883.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... James McNeill Whistler at St. Ives, 1883 Whistler needs no one to sit for him now. He is finished with portraits, with people. Finished with nocturnes too, soft edges, the muted light of a coastal fogscape. He needs...

A Happy Couple.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... A Happy Couple Evenings she hung her purple dress on the balcony above the water as Portuguese naval officers in summer whites walked from the hotel lobby. They must know the ocean like their front yard, ...

Dry Brush Painting of Winter Crows.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Dry Brush Painting of Winter Crows Fed by hunger, greatness comes down to a few sudden strokes of the brush. In no time, five birds crack the frozen sky, vagrant notes on a scale of space. At...

Corcomroe Abbey.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Corcomroe Abbey Finding yourself in ruins like this gives neglect another purpose. Walls sprout flowers and the sky wanders through. Here, salvation calls for a Celtic cross against barren hills,...

The Return.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... The Return Imagine the shock of a twelve-year-old boy who goes downstairs one night to ask the maid a question and finds her standing at the sink of her small bathroom, the door open just enough for him...

A Visit.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... A Visit It was her long-deferred (raising three children) Sentimental journey, two weeks on her own in the city, Her freedom vagrant as a tabloid page Shuffling in the morning wind. ...

Cliche.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Cliche It's not the words that scathe, surprise, or seek That are wanted this dismal day but the steady, Worn, blunt words that are the coins we don't Examine, the trees we don't notice, the years We forget. When...

The boy in the tree.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... ON A FEBRUARY AFTERNOON, Wallace Harkins is driving out of town on a five-mile country road to see his mother. He was born and raised in the house where she lives, but the total impracticality of keeping an aging lady out there alone in that...

Let the day perish.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... MORNINGS WE STOOD BAREFOOT on the gray carpet, our hair disheveled and our faces imprinted with fine red creases from our bedsheets, wearing the rumpled shorts and T-shirts we had slept in, yawning and rubbing our eyes as we waited for the...

Poetic License.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... ALAN WAS A POET, but that was not his attraction. Not for my husband John and not for me. John was a poet, too. In those days everybody was a poet. Our living room crawled with poets, late at night, quite literally, and everyone who wasn't a...

Why it remains unfinished.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... WE SAT UP ARGUING THE AFTERLIFE late into the night, until a warm Gulf wind gusted through the cypress stand and jerked the fiberglass patch off the hole in the school bus's roof. Tripp fired up the lantern and hurried outside to chase it down....

Cloudland.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... DOLORES ARRIVED AT THE CABIN BY MIDAFTERNOON, with the sun still high and casting few shadows, three days after the unexpected call from Pardon that had pulled her out of the stupor she was in and launched her again into a heightened state of...

Body, numinous, words.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... WE ARE CONFRONTED AT EVERY TURN by a world that defies our comprehension, and for this reason I am standing naked in the small breakfast nook off my kitchen at quarter to ten on a Wednesday night. I am alone, and the only sounds are the sounds...

Lawn darts.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... FIRST OF ALL, it didn't even feel like I was falling. It didn't feel like anything at all, really. It was as if time had just stopped and now everything was slowly rotating past me. I'd expected there to be a roar of wind or something, but...

On Lewis Simpson's idea of tradition: a new Englander's story.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2004... HISTORIANS KNOW THAT THEY ARE PART of the historical process and cannot stand on some platform outside of it, but they seldom speak in an autobiographical mode. It may be an appropriate form for those who have had unusually interesting or...

First fruits.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... REACHING INTO THE BOX FROM[ HANDSEL BOOKS, the two-year-old literary imprint of Other Press, I happily pulled out presents by the handful, Handsels handsome in design, mostly dressed in austerely confident dustjackets and quality cloth...