The Southern Review articles from March 1998

The Southern Review archives from March 1998

Another train dream; Housekeeping. (poems)
March 22, 1998... I should be looking for my father's grave Along the river's edge, the Monongahela That he loved to name. Or a stack of ashes by the railroad tracks Near Pittsburgh, Plattsburgh, Ashtabula. Once he and I rode west and...

Meditation on three crows; The insomniac quest; Fixing dinner. (poems)
March 22, 1998... Three crows come calling through a shroud of fog, perch atop the birch, speaking dark words, coals of truth. They've come to scavenge the road for deer or squirrel, or even me. True democrats, they...

Caribou. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Mutual wounds are mended-- the scarrings of fierce marriages. In blue-black winter days, they shed and eat their antlers, nestle, like huskies, in snow, till tundra stirs gray water and they take stock of their...

Sea of faith; Update.
March 22, 1998... Once when I was teaching "Dover Beach" to a class of freshmen, a young woman raised her hand and said, "I'm confused about this `Sea of Faith.'" "Well," I said, "let's talk about it. We probably need to talk a bit...

Kennings. (poem)
March 22, 1998... 1. Mid-Age I stoop in dirt where my boy and I push trucks, shoving a dozer deep in its hole. Beyond us the screen door slaps. My son's face blanks. What does he see in the house over my shoulder? Or has memory turned his...

Gift; Spoons. (poems)
March 22, 1998... From this summer world (no matter that the days shorten and the winds plow the canyons at our back) I think of sending you a tree. Take this one, for instance: It will outlast the season, whether of joy or...

Haldol. (poem)
March 22, 1998... I'll wear a long-sleeve shirt with cuffs for protection--never restrain an escalated girl alone--since the night the Haldol wore so thin she sputtered saliva and flung her weight against each lock on the ward ...

Time and the child. (poem)
March 22, 1998... 1. "You'll grow down, and I'll grow up. The hair will come out of your face and mine grow on. You'll be Alexander, I'll be Daddy, tell you off, and tell you what to do." A child's alarming fantasy, it...

Dead man revives in morgue; Poem for every other. (poem)
March 22, 1998... That it happened in Cairo must mean something. Freud says there are no accidents; the newsgroup alt.conspiracy and the Ohio Unorganized Militia insist there is no coincidence. The Egyptians know things about...

The weaknesses of the mouth. (poem)
March 22, 1998... There were punishments for the weaknesses Of the mouth. Two uncles had killed themselves With salt and fatty meat; an aunt had slaughtered Herself with sugar. "Each of them knew," My mother said, but I was growing ...

Amy and Brian. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Newark, Delaware, December 1996: A freshman at the University of Delaware secretly gave birth at a local motel, attended by the child's father, also a college freshman. The newborn was then apparently bludgeoned to death...

The house of blue light. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Little Richard comes on the TV at Gold's Gym, and the first thing that happens is, I burst into tears, and the second thing is, I think to myself, I can't sing this music, but if I could, I wouldn't accept a smidgen of...

Champlain: West Shore: Cartesian. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Three decades have flown, but that's where Evvie's camp burned down. There, the ledge, swept bare, on which my brother, who's gone, and I leaned, tridents in hand. Perch, rock bass, rose upward to our crumbs--the "plan"--then...

Wrasse. (poem)
March 22, 1998... The ocean has a perfect memory of who you are, salt calling to salt, water to water, and strips you of family, job, and address as quickly as you click the dive watch, check the p.s.i., dump air and case...

Cleaning day; Minor league; The unclean woman. (poems)
March 22, 1998... They come with buckets, wire brushes, knives to scrape the dirt from fading stones. They climb the sandy hill, pull bitterweeds and snake grass, stop only to wipe their burning faces. And they raise with...

New England graveyard. (poem)
March 22, 1998... for Nanci Kincaid, Peterborough Nanci is taking us to "the graveyard down the hill," where she went last night to read the names. We walk four abreast down a narrow country road and have to scramble for the shoulder ...

Traveling woman; The siblings: SS. Walburga, Willibald, and Winebald. (poems)
March 22, 1998... 1. Rebecca West in Yugoslavia The worst possible tourist, lagging behind, not listening, trying to remember something from some book she didn't bring along, wondering where she lost the hat, she turns the...

Leap second at the turn of the millennium; Group photograph at a wedding. (poems)
March 22, 1998... After she slipped and hit her head on the front steps, my older daughter stopped breathing, and I could only cradle her body gone slack as the dead weight of a sack of rock salt, her head rolling from side to...

Sad song; Terrible love. (poems)
March 22, 1998... The black hearts of automobiles under the hoods: all night long I hear them beating beyond the apartment window-ledge. I tell you, the telephone is planning on ringing. It tenses, tenses, then all at once ...

The wallet; Modern transit. (poems)
March 22, 1998... I might have seen it first, the wallet just off the curb on the main drag of Old Orchard Beach, but my friend and I split the cash-two hundred and eight dollars, I will always remember-- down the middle, without...

Autumn equinox. (poem)
March 22, 1998... I feel my body letting go of light drawn to the wisdom of a harvest moon I feel it welcome the lengthening night like a lover in early afternoon. My dream are windfall in a field gone wild. I gather them through the...

Bellocq's Ophelia. (poem)
March 22, 1998... from a photograph circa 1912 In Millais's painting, Ophelia dies face-up, eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds growing out of her watery grave, floating on the...

Deferment. (short story)
March 22, 1998... In the summer of 1970, I spent a lot of time trying to get a girl named Lizzie Burford to sleep with me. I had the idea that we would do it at the Goshen Motor Court, out on US 42, near the county line. We'd lie in each other's arms and shiver...

Pagan babies. (short story)
March 22, 1998... Going door to door down Zita Street, Molly Andree could see right through most of the houses. They were "shotguns," in which the rooms lined up like railroad cars, without even a hall. The front room opened into the next one, a bedroom, which...

After the war was over. (short story)
March 22, 1998... As soon as she figure out that he was a spy, Marie Ormsby began to feel better about her decision to sleep with Alexi Ivanovich. Because it had taken a decision, relentlessly premeditated over two painful days. She also felt better about her...

'Port de Bras.' (short story)
March 22, 1998... Ballerina is a magic word. Any girl who hears it pictures in her mind a beautiful dancer in a sparkling costume, skimming along on the tips of her toes, seeming to fly like a bird. Of course, the dancer in the girl's imagination...

Eric Voegelin's recovery of the remembering story.
March 22, 1998... Given Eric Voegelin's analysis of reflective consciousness and the analogical language it speaks to tell its tale, one need hardly make the case that his work is relevant to the study of literature. It uses the language of story and tells a...

Whatever happened to literary theory?
March 22, 1998... It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle A curious fate has befallen the word "theory." One hears graduate students and colleagues in literary departments say they "do" theory. To the...

Three ways of reading.
March 22, 1998... I It may be true that the "culture wars" in the universities are over. There are reports of "a general lessening of theoretical polemical fervor." Ideological conflicts have shifted from universities to high schools, public and...