The Southern Review articles from March 2000

The Southern Review archives from March 2000

The Gathering Light.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Morning shines on the cowling of the Yamaha locked onto the stern of the boat. Spears of light shoot away from the gunmetal-gray enamel; now I wait for God to show instead of calling Him a liar. I have just...

Meaning.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... A black summer night, no moon, the thick air drenched with honeysuckle and swamp gum. In a pool of yellow torchlight on a knife-blade, the brand name Hickey Miffle-- I give in to meaninglessness, look up, ...

Where the Light Slants against the Tide.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... We arrive by boat, rowing ourselves home. The tide pulls conversation from our mouths, the backyard is full of wind blowing through the lonely heads of our family. Sometimes my sister swings out from the tree and...

Tropic Bird.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Lord Howe Island, 1996 Wakes from nimbus cut to streaks by the clipped volcanic peaks mingle with an orange sky, the color of parrotfish gut. Monsoon time, nothing's quite right, people drink or sleep or drift...

The Night Heron.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Midnight, my mind's full of ink tonight, I'm drawing up some endings to make a few last marks. Life's complete. You're just a part of the mix, a pain cocktail, dash of white spirit, some pulvules of dextropropoxyphene...

Her Photographs.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... B. A. B., 1943-1974 1. She's seven years old here, missing the two Adult teeth. There was a man selling rides On a Shetland, walking our neighborhood. The pony's round as a barrel. I don't remember How she...

My Complaints Were Doves and Mountains in the Rain.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Even as a calf is bound by the rope, I am tied to you. Even as the fish tugs on the hook with all his swat I am hooked to you. Even as the trident genitals pierce the flesh, I stick in you, crying. Daily, for you, the...

Grapes.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Merely the word, and an image rises to the inner eye of vine-dressed Dionysus reaching up to grasp a cluster, cradling it a moment in his hand as if in blessing--offering to mortals then the purple fruit still shining with...

Olives.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... They are, we know, an acquired taste-- something for adults, just like martinis, truffles, caviar, asparagus, or sweet and thoughtful sex. Imagine someone who has never seen or eaten one: where to begin? With a taxonomy ...

Vanishing Point.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... 1. I'd had it explained a hundred times and been shown as many examples: the point at which parallel lines drawn in perspective converge (sometimes through a cloud), well, that's the vanishing point of the picture....

Anthem.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... There was an anthem when I was young, and it was called "Free Bird," and the band that made this anthem was called Lynyrd Skynyrd, and what it has in common with great art I cannot say, although when this song...

Wisteria.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... The hands. The secret lies in the hands, the dancer from Mexico says on the afternoon radio program, and I wonder which secret? The secret of everything opening over and over again every April? Even these windows,...

Sometimes There Are Absences Too Big for the Heart to Fill.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... for Arthur Szyk, illuminator (1894-1951) The day before, hard rains brought down the last late tatters of elm, oak, and maple leaves, the last slim-stalked butternut and hickory, blown in long, wind-worked winnows over...

At Fossil Butte.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... A wild burning all across high plains of Nebraska and into Wyoming, hours, miles of grasslands and sagebrush charred on the sun's anvil, and that oily, gravel-licked road, I-80, stretching toward the horizon, ever...

Optimism.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... My friend the pessimist thinks I'm optimistic because I seem to believe in the next good thing. But I see rueful shadows almost everywhere. When the sun rises I think of collisions and AK-47s. It's my mother's fault, who...

Experience.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... At twelve I set the corner lot ablaze. Bad judgment, from which I discovered playing with matches--if you survive-- leaves you with a story to tell. His shades drawn, the abortionist said $500, which neither of...

Backwaters.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... My dogs were dead and it was winter; I had no good reason to walk the beach in Brigantine, as if reasons mattered. Aren't they what we manufacture? The sea was whitecap and wind, the gulls loners standing in groups,...

Enough Rain for Agnes Walquist.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... (Five little fits of tears) I It happened at midnight. --What I possessed and lost, Or what I maybe never possessed And have nonetheless lost, Or what in any case I Was not born possessing But received...

The Night of My Conception.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... The night of my conception I wasn't there. My father searched among the broken tiles and the dust of their rooms, my mother behind him, her hand on his heavy back, her mouth urgent, whispering, Find him, find him. My...

Owl.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... A saw-whet owl in the garden this morning coming upon my mother's death in the far city. We send whatever we can with all the hope there is that we be understood. Every time you turn, there's always something lovely. A...

Other Days.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... I remember washing her body as she said over and over the one word No, my hands laving the cloth over her breasts and belly, and the blood.... I remember how blood, when it is lifted from a body, becomes another thing,...

The Ward Cat.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... The man in the hospital who, late in the night, the women sick, asleep, took off his clothes, folding them neatly and laying them down, the shirt and pants, the socks and underwear, and the shoes side by side beside...

Rousak, Head and Torso, 1951.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Walter spoke definitively to me to say I should please shut the fuck up: the place was too loud, he was too deaf, and besides even the rats were asleep. A March morning, 1951, the light pouring in through the broken...

Houses in Order.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... In cardboard boxes under the Williamsburg Bridge a congregation of mature rats founds a new order based on the oldest religious principle: they eat whatever they can get their teeth into. By day they move slowly about their...

Jazz.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... We'd meet at eleven near City Hall to walk the bridge to Brooklyn, only when the weather cooperated, for I had a dread of cold and rain. Mainly we talked of books-poetry, fiction, history, travel--; he had a hunger for them...

Without a Philosophy.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... ... like a dog between 4 trees... --e-mail message from a friend Toward the end of this summer, this long labyrinth, I thought of you in a clearing green and sunlit, bordered by four tall trees and the dusky spaces ...

Death Be Not Proud.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Conversations with the dead are monologues. No one ever answers, asks a question, comments, makes objections. But the dead are there, in your head; you hear yourself urgent on invisible phones, speaking fast at every...

Mirages.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Who can see behind him, know what jumps unseen? We don't believe invisibility, so lay our fall to fate, not thieves. The world's a moving screen. Our eyes frame what matters. Comprehending acts and objects not...

Smith's Cove.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... The lure of a glass-quick chromis, like something stolen or missing from the night sky, then the striped eye of a spotfin passing once then drawing back, a dorsal fin's deft maneuvering. Something in me wakes, and I follow--...

After the Storm.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... I Not a scrap of sail idling on boom or mast To trouble or remind the eye. Just sand and sea Where once the beach house stood. All the past Windswept, destruction so seamless It might have been dreamt--like the...

That Other Four-Letter F-Word the Gods So Love.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Sure, fame enthralls us. That's easy. What of those who finger the beaded glass but never get to drain it--say, Pete Meyers, Michael Jordan's cobwebbed backup, or Yankee Wally Pipp, who rested one and sat thereafter as...

Our Armor.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... "Clothes make the man." Where the sleeve cuts I've left to experts in men's issues, say, how the break of cuff asserts authority in this blue pinstriped looking-for-work. To be a man is to labor with hard heart, for...

Tomorrow.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Never mind that. This time I'll not dawdle in lawn chair beside the plum's yawn of bloom, its white throat open and calling. I'll stop my ears and shutter my eyes a field so narrow even sparrows can't shadow the taxes you'd...

John Brown's Face.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... When weird John Brown, driving his father's prize cattle to market, alone, only twelve and no abolitionist, chanced upon a slave being beaten with an iron camp-shovel, he renegotiated ownership. Shovel still red...

1965 Dodge Dart.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... My father paid $500 for it in 1974, when we first arrived in the U.S. from Spain. Though not in the best of shape, it was the biggest & grandest thing we'd ever owned. It took my mother to work, me to school, &...

The Last Days of the War.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Milwaukee's Fulton Street was all fish fries and lemons. 1973. Chocolate to the east, beer yeast bubbling due north, and the way the wind comes back sometimes is with a vengeance. Didn't we have to feel our way ...

Table Manners.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... The arguments starting earlier each time, over coffee, dessert, the meal, the wine, their evenings drifted into slow reverse: trysts became appointments, chores, and worse, the nothing that they had to lose they lost...

Umbrellas.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Suddenly up wherever rain is, brash as circumflex accents, tablecloth-patterned, tartan, and plain, rigged like crinolines, cruelly tipped, nudging and shoving over our heads, as helpless, borne aloft, as...

At Sam McAllister's Grave.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... after Omagh, August 16, 1998 1 It was here they brought him, under a thorn tree up a mile of brambled avenue, when they buried McAllister in '99, who chose to walk into the yeomen's fire the night of the...

The Barbershop.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... With the jawbones of asses, we enter rank and file to join shaggy allies already thick in their smoke of fretting and cigarettes. From huddles of two or three scattered against the walls, politics, bits of debts...

Melancholy.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... One quantum leap from its dim world to our guardian lamps flooding garage doors and beds of anemones, gloomy jogs of houses, out toward the wild ramble of a thicket's edge, and this ...

The Family of Bro. Cliff Phillips.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Like the hollow taste of communion bread, his name lingered under "Sick and Shut In," above the last-ditch "Request for Prayer," where his family now waits to be healed-- lists that are always inserted between ...

The Field.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... for R.M. The hum of wood lice, the way it approximates the frequency of C-sharp, the way it is heard only in close proximity to the rotting tree that stands alone in the field; ...

Fishing on Sunday.(Short Story)
March 22, 2000... WHEN I WAS A BOY, I LIVED with my mother in a trailer on the banks of the Black Warrior River. My father was dead, killed one night when, drunk, he drove his truck into an eighteen-wheeler out on the Birmingham highway. My mother cut up...

First Child.(Short Story)
March 22, 2000... THE STATION WAGON HAD EASED into the cottage drive a little past three. The man and woman got out, each turning to reach back for the child. The storekeeper across the highway noted them and wondered if he could recall them from the summer...

Is Hard to Find.(Short Story)
March 22, 2000... SHE REMEMBERED THAT IN THE STORY, the family couldn't find an old house in the woods. It seemed full of meaning. And that the grandmother's cat was named Pity Sing. She was an ex-nun traveling to Macon, Georgia, because there was a story...

James Dickey: Journey to War.
March 22, 2000... DURING THE SPRING OF 1945, Radar Officer James Dickey was hard at work composing poems and reading Louis Untermeyer's poetry anthology and Shakespeare's sonnets. He paid particular attention to Untermeyer's selection of Ernest Dowson's...

Sweeney Revisited.
March 22, 2000... NO FEW AMONG MY CORRESPONDENTS have made discreet inquiries after the condition of Matthew Sweeney, my dear friend and fellow poet, of Donegal and Dombey Street, London WC 1. The hypochondria he suffers from, about which I've written at length,...

An Awful Gift and a Blindness.
March 22, 2000... FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS at least, any white person born in the South who's ever published a poem, novel, play, or his or her collected prayers has been met at every crossroad with the question, "Why has the South produced so many good...

Horseradish and Roast.
March 22, 2000... ROBERT FROST'S DICTUM that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down provides a familiar but only partial basis to begin thinking about what is essential to a poem. On the level of secondary form, Frost was one for boundaries;...

Demolition Diagrams.
March 22, 2000... WHEN I FIRST PONDERED A CAREER as a poet, I was easily intimidated. Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert...

The Noble Mr. Heaney, Poet.
March 22, 2000... ISAIAH BERLIN'S WELL-KNOWN ESSAY on Tolstoy begins with a parlor game based on the Greek parable of the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. The human community, then, envisioned as hedgehogs and foxes. The...

At the Writer's Desk.
March 22, 2000... MOST WORKS OF ART--novels, poems, paintings, symphonies--are created in privacy. Solitary conditions are necessary to get the thing done right. Yet wouldn't it be curious to set up a chair in your favorite writer's den and watch him or her...

An Interview with Charles Wright.
March 22, 2000... All my poems seem to be an ongoing argument with myself about the unlikelihood of salvation. --Charles Wright, "Halflife" CHARLES WRIGHT'S POETRY is a strange alchemy, a fusion of the direct, understated lyrics of ancient Chinese poets...