The Southern Review articles from March 1999

The Southern Review archives from March 1999

After Giving Birth I Recall the Madonna and Child.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Who could ever believe it: The cows, shoulder to shoulder, lowing three-part harmony, the stable so Hollywood-set tidy, Joseph and Mary, serene, smiling, and the boy, pink and fat, already blessing us with two...

My Mother Among Bears.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Dressed in slacks, jacket, chained half-glasses perched on her powdered bosom to inspect foliage, my mother meets a black bear on her morning path, its long hair sunlit, its breath rising with small ghosts....

Burning the Orange Peels.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Whenever it became too rank she would close the sickroom door (the kitchen and that room adjoined), peel an orange, and place a curl of peel across the burner points. The fire would pop and run once around the...

Double Elegy in Spring.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for Stephen Glove will do. Or foxglove. The warm inside of missing them or the trumpeting outside. Here, here is a hand. Sheathed and clutching a wild belfry of pink throats--the wailing not done, not...

Flying to Sausalito with My Sisters.(poem)
March 22, 1999... In a cloud above the Badlands Rosi's right hand newly bandaged. Beside her, rage disguised--tiny carcinoma grazing Tricia's wrist. Under my arm the knot I've just discovered. Our bodies' deep ...

Labor Day.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Morning's IV done, all his pills, he turns to Bill's gift of melon-- icy, sweet chunks of honeydew brought home from the local deli. I watch each bite he takes, then wipe his chin. Unbelievable,...

The Trunk.(poem)
March 22, 1999... I envied my dog that option-- the rattan trunk chewed this morning to twig. All night I had warded off that dream, my brother alive once more, asking if I'd like to see the trick again. All night,...

When My Mother Speaks of Loneliness.(poem)
March 22, 1999... I offer to bring her some books, the new Updike, an Oscar Wilde she hasn't read. My brother is dead, her youngest, his ashes just settled in their urn. "No," she turns to me and says, "bring Shane,...

Millennium.(poem)
March 22, 1999... At twentieth century's end I'm ready to accept Van Gogh's thick paste of oily light for the pear- blossom branch that the Van Eycks painted petal by petal. I'm ready to hear as a seamless whole the whalesong weaving through...

The Gardener.(poem)
March 22, 1999... It seemed as if one long season had passed in grief, in harrowing uncertainty: the hard wait before the harvest. Then one morning near where they had laid him he appeared, in torn garments, hands stained with silt, ...

A Parable of the Body.(poem)
March 22, 1999... For it is good to know the strange happiness of the flesh: at the marriage feast Christ gestures the waters to miracle, then lets the sweet cup pass away from him. A sullen figure among the celebrants, he casts a...

Orpah.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law and returned to her people. --The Book of Ruth The cooking, the clothing, the counting, the scrubbing, the blessings, the sundowns, the stars, the strings. You couldn't dream,...

A.M.(poem)
March 22, 1999... The sun's confined, the room a morning-dusk, but past my ache I squint at the blinds and slowly come to see louvered light mounting like yellow rungs on the upholstered chair. I make out a clay flowerpot standing on the...

Specimen Days.(poem)
March 22, 1999... A scoured luster appears on the stainless-steel pitcher, like scratches from a Brillo pad suddenly caught by the light. Half-naked, shivering, I clutch the handle, a wedge-shaped seven, and guide my stop-and-go flow with my...

Sunday Lunch at Baptist Hospital.(poem)
March 22, 1999... As in most hospital cafeterias, fried food's the chef d'oeuvre of their chefs, a connoisseur's collection of cholesterol, a dieter's wet dream: dry deep-fried chicken; pecan pie; green beans with melted cheese; hot...

Recalling Icarus.(poem)
March 22, 1999... They were out of everything: flour, cat food, money, health, but mostly they were out of love with life. They had done everything worth doing from having and raising children, cats and dogs, gardens, ...

August.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Thinking The bright scarves of the cries Of children at play, I look out my window and see the dark-Haired boy there with my sons, Belly thrust before him, his arms bent up At the elbows like small, flightless...

328 Sixteenth Avenue.(poem)
March 22, 1999... April 1948, backyard and alley, the buckled brickweave Of the walk. The shapes of my light are filled with shadows Like brushed, gray clouds: a dark that in the photographs Never reaches the luster of my grandmother's patent...

An Untruth.(poem)
March 22, 1999... When I enter the stables, a swallow clips my chest with its wing in such a rush to escape her corner over the musty feeding trough. She finds a nearby wire and scolds me. My intrusion brings back an enduring...

Another Day.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Morning still pitch-dark at seven, then light starts to daub the east with chilblained fingers, beginning behind the table-topped block of Ben Cuana, and a few ash-pink horizontal streaks slowly show themselves to the...

Gifts in January.(poem)
March 22, 1999... The sound of one foot crunching dead grass on the way to the lake where a family of whooper swans makes its own music (the parents out of canary-yellow beaks, the young squeakers out of black-tipped gray beaks...

I Forget.(poem)
March 22, 1999... one October evening, I was twelve, walking home through brown dusk down Thomas Avenue, past the last horse in town, his head one black knight against the white stable door, chessboard of one square-- how, when I called his...

How to Write a Happy Poem.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for Peter, who asked for one Remember something that frightens you, something you've told no one, want no one to know: the time, say, when you hold a lightbulb to your infant brother's face to see what happens....

Not Even Light Is Innocent Now.(poem)
March 22, 1999... A blind man, hands gnarled and numb from years of smoking, walks by. Amnesic clouds stumble in a sky that could stack the deck without us catching on. The evening has the edge of despair that croaks the blues. Across ...

Home.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for Debra Kang Dean Yesterday, trying for a new way from work to my coastal home at Bogue Banks on county backroads that from Greenville began rightly enough with County Home Road and...

The Attic.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Wherever you are is it, is in the middle of what you're supposed to pay attention to. For me, for instance, right now, this attic room filled with things that happened to land together-- rolled rugs, scuffed suitcases, a...

Downtown Diner: Columbus, Ohio.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Scuzzy Michael's Diner. My briefcase and French loaf in tow, on my way to the office, in need of the restroom and some coffee. Inside, flashback to San Jose and my greasy-- spoon, Welfare mornings in tattered-- ...

The House on the Corner.(poem)
March 22, 1999... of 21st and B needs more than a fresh coat of paint, more than the green vine that creeps through seams in the concrete, slow, supple, like music rising from the basement (a blues played bad but hard by a man grown old with...

The Boys.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Two mottle-shouldered old ladies in cutoffs, legs dangling over the river's edge, hair pulled back in two gray buns, eyes slit-thin at the glare from the water, seated on newspaper to keep their shorts dry-the first...

The New World: Samuel Sewall.(poem)
March 22, 1999... God is teaching me a new lesson, how to live a widower's life. Her teeth clenched, the terrible wrack and spasm. Outside, the dark woods full of shadows. Monday, my dear wife is embowelled, and put in cerecloth, ...

The New World: William Byrd II.(poem)
March 22, 1999... From the journals: Ate boiled milk for breakfast. Read Homer's Odyssey. Proceeded to Williamsburg, where I found all well. Went to the capital, where I sent for a wench to clean my room, and ...

Hammering Stones.(poem)
March 22, 1999... On the gospel channel, bodybuilders: one rolls up a frying pan, one uncurls a horseshoe's steel Omega; one lays hands on a pair of Georgia license plates, rips them in half. Leather weight-belts, talc, sweat, glutted...

Sentimental Pictures.(poem)
March 22, 1999... They find me now in cheap hotels Or laundromats, where no one means To dwell for long. The title, when There is one, is always Autumn Scene, Opening upon a forest glade Or rolling field, inviting to the eye; A...

On I-75, Driving Home from My Father-in-Law's Funeral.(poem)
March 22, 1999... As I ease into the passing lane something black cartwheels toward my windshield. I hope: bundle of wet rags, rain-drenched, windblown bag. But the soft thud I'd heard from the car ahead of me supplies the...

Sleeping with Two Women.(poem)
March 22, 1999... As I remember it, we emptied three bottles of Mateus and wedged ourselves onto their third-story windowsill. We watched the snow pile up around us, one fat rectangular flake after another shuffling down ...

The Idea of Sirloin.(short story)
March 22, 1999... The waiter set the dean's plate down with an unnecessary flourish, and Suzie Abrams, then and there, fell in love with the steak. It was a gorgeous piece of meat, Argentina-shaped, hatched with grill marks, glimmering with the promise of spiced...

Juana la Loca.(short story)
March 22, 1999... As a child, I had a small guitar in a red satin case trimmed with pearls. I played the clavichord. I loved music, and Latin. They were my company. I spoke little. I suspect that I feared my tongue as others did; it was sharp and slit swiftly. I...

Gloucester.(short story)
March 22, 1999... I AM PROPPED UP IN MY HOSPITAL BED, reading the New York Times, as I have every day since the age of ten. Although my eyes are burning, I read. A war criminal has evaded capture in Bosnia. One former Kennedy wife complains of the manner in...

The Ruptures and Limits of Absence.(short stories)
March 22, 1999... If I were to see things in a fateful manner, more than likely I would have gotten a job with the telephone company straight out of high school. I'd've been one of those pole guys wearing a silver hard hat. If not that, maybe I'd've become one...

Art History.(short story)
March 22, 1999... BECAUSE THEY HAD DRUNK a whole bottle o[ wine, whose name made her think of the Irish jigs danced by her addled aunts and made him think of leg of lamb--a bottle that cost more than the rest of the picnic even there in Saint-Remy--and because...

Doing Country: Hemingway's Geographical Imagination.
March 22, 1999... IN ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES, the young Italian countess, Renata, asks Colonel Cantwell whether he feels remorse about having killed men in battle. Though ostensibly untroubled, Cantwell confesses that he has had "combat dreams" and...

Place, Narrative, and the Writing Self: The Poetics of Being in The Garden of Eden.
March 22, 1999... PERHAPS SINCE THOSE SUNNY DAYS IN PLEISTOCENE AFRICA when we first shaped stone into the uncanny symmetry paralleling our own bilateralism, or since those later nights in cooler Europe when we first shaped a life into a self and buried it...

The Where of Writing: Hemingway's Sense of Place.
March 22, 1999... TO THINK ABOUT "SENSE OF PLACE" in relation to Ernest Hemingway, one must first revise the phrase into the plural. For Hemingway had a sense of quite a few places, the most obvious being Oak Park, Illinois; northern Michigan; Paris; parts of...

Last Stand on the Big Wood.
March 22, 1999... It has come to me recently that I've spent a lot of my life hunting Hemingway's ghost in places where he left tracks: Left Bank Paris, the Camargue, Key West, Ketchum. The realization struck me as rather odd at first. That is to say, if I were...

The Marble Faun and the Waste of History.
March 22, 1999... LAST JUNE I WENT TO A CONFERENCE of Nathaniel Hawthorne scholars held in Rome, where the writer spent the winters of 1858 and '59 and found inspiration for The Marble Faun. There were Penguin editions of that book in the hands of these belated...

On the Pipeline.
March 22, 1999... My father never went to college. This was not unusual for Depression-era boys, especially farm boys from downstate Illinois. Like all his friends, he started working right out of high school, first as a postal clerk and then as a pipeliner at...

Ireland's Best.
March 22, 1999... IF ONE WERE TO COMPOSE A SCALE of oppositions upon which to consider contemporary poetry by Irish women, the Dublin poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944) would appear at one end, and Medbh McGuckian (b. 1951), from Belfast, at the other. Although their...

The Poetry Man.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Kenneth Koch brings out this year his sixteenth volume of poetry, Straits, as well as his fourth and most ambitious book on the reading and writing of verse, Making Your Own Days. Welcome return of the poetry man, like the ice-cream man making...