The Southern Review articles from March 2002

The Southern Review archives from March 2002

Hank Williams Dream.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Hank Williams Dream We tumble in bus-station cardboard, suitcase or package or a child's game in leaves-- wind's memory beyond this everywhere-place of doors like holes in sieves. So we dream inside them, the...

Birdfoot.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Birdfoot A birdfoot violet has seeded itself beneath our spreading hydrangea. So life goes on self-interestedly, as capital seeks opportunity. A reservoir filled by spring rains holds water for our house. Movie...

Rain from a Hurricane.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Rain from a Hurricane In wandering remnants, a hurricane brought us whole Septembers of rain. Our stream now rushes, echoing downpour, staying and going. Yet our heads are where time races or jumps or is almost...

Is.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Is [B]eing is twofold.... Being conveys the truth of a proposition which unites together subject and attribute by a copula, notified by this word "is"; and in this sense being is what answers to the question, "Does it...

Often in dreams.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... (Often in dreams) Often, in dreams, he moved through a city not found in the real world. From one dream to the next he charted its streets, the texture of its neighborhoods. From one to the next, he recalled what lay to the north or south,...

You take a train.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... (You take a train) You take a train through a foreign country. Noticing a large farmhouse with a red tile roof set off among wheat fields, you imagine having been born there, a life tilling those fields. Or passing through towns with gray...

The pleasure of creating something.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... (The pleasure of creating something) The pleasure of creating something--it was like theft. Nothing had to be given back. A poem, a picture, a song--patched together from inner scraps: a few words on paper, a perception, the memory of a...

His want formed a craving.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... (His want formed a craving) His want formed a craving never satisfied. The things he bought, food he ate, the women he desired--it was a fire he couldn't snuff out. I need this, he would say, and his longing grew so huge that if it were...

Dickens in Pleasantville.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Dickens in Pleasantville It is neither the best nor worst of times, no children begging in the streets, or fathers coming home coughing, covered with soot. The mills, mines, and factories are the nearby casino hotels,...

Poe in Margate.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Poe in Margate To come back and learn his alcoholism was an illness--Poe had to laugh at that. He knew the vanity of excuses better than anyone, and how good self-destruction feels when one is in the act of it. Still,...

Chekhov in Port Republic.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Chekhov in Port Republic No one but me took special notice of his presence, and he hadn't come to heal, unless to render the residual sorrow behind all our pretensions is to heal. He was as attentive to torpor as he...

Stendhal in Sea Isle City.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Stendhal in Sea Isle City Because he believed "Everything can be acquired in solitude except character" (and his character was fully formed), he thought a beach town in winter would suit him. Just a house with a good...

Peruvian Views.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Peruvian Views i. Over NW Peru Are those clouds, or snowy mountain peaks? I think they might be both. And the thin, white, broken line I see, peering through the smeared plane window to where a heaped swirl of...

Paradise.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Paradise The porpoise arced through yellow glaze, a scimitar, to breathe the humid air and plunge back into its wavy world, the many-doored water, ajar in an offshore breeze. And from the shore, those who looked with...

A Woman Like Yourself.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A Woman Like Yourself You walk toward a woman like yourself, but older, only she isn't. You know how that is? It could be anywhere (Rue de Charpentier, maybe), and as strong a desire not to die as anything...

"Four Serious Songs, Op.121".(Poem)
March 22, 2002... "Four Serious Songs, Op.121" Beautifully and elliptically the sunlight plays on the syllables of the sea a few small songs of morning, and the herring gulls rise in swirling sixths, then descend in thirds; not that it...

The Cement Garden.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Cement Garden When I went to the garden, there was nothing like a fountain. The wind made a part in the leaves where a plane passed. Then the sun crept over the granite wall, taking a century. A bird changed...

"Interior with Maroon Sofa".(Poem)
March 22, 2002... "Interior with Maroon Sofa" --oil painting by Galen Hansen In a museum in Great Falls, Montana, I looked at this picture, and it wasn't the sofa I fixed on at first but the giant green grasshopper on the sofa's back,...

The Veil.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Veil A screen she's obliged to regard the world through, dividing her sight into the compound-thousand eye of the observant fly, nothing complete, not quite attached, not quite angry, somewhere between the...

Dickens Inn: London.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Dickens Inn: London How fine to be alive, sitting by the Thames only a month after my second angioplasty. Then it was Valentine's Day, weeks pierced by angina, aisles of greeting cards, candy hearts with "U B Mine" and...

Dolphins at Point Pleasant Beach.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Dolphins at Point Pleasant Beach A sudden pod gathers a throng together to gawk by the water. It's rare, their half- mooning close along the break line. Wearing official red trunks, lifeguards keep us from slipping...

Raiment.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Raiment 1. Everyone gathered for the class picture, standing around in sunlight and multiplied shade in the spring on the quad. Not a time to "meet new people." Instead, subgroups, friends, cluster, talking. So...

Of Scrimmage.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Of Scrimmage for Father The offensive line has always been my game, the dangerous, blameful task of pushing the pile. Been our game. The McFadden line-what a front we'd have fielded--stock-bodied, wide-thighed,...

O--.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... O-- Blood has no real life in poems, but it usually rises to meet them. (My brother Brian's driven four hours home from Notre Dame to share a few bottles of home-brewed and tell me how things are going in...

Ice to Ash.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Ice to Ash Getting up close to a terminal moraine, you learn ash doesn't always come from flame. Sometimes it's just the color of what's been held cold so long, and made so little of, it feels the same. KEVIN...

Virginal Orgy.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Virginal Orgy In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat, Senior, Captain of the high-school team, carried us to the Tournament of Champions, and we won. I left the game with my friend the hourglass beauty, and her friend...

Ceremony of Burial.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Ceremony of Burial Looking south, at the base of the year, across the pond brightly cloaked, the woods like a tuft of wilderness, it seems that my father may be leaving the earth. I had not understood that I had...

Frosted Elfin.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Frosted Elfin When I was a child, I could look down, over my tummy, and see myself, classic and symmetrical, like a slipper conch. If only I had a flower, there, now, the brown purple fur of a pansy... My love...

Slowly He Starts.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Slowly He Starts And slowly he starts to seem more far away, he seems to waft, drift at a distance, my husband, in his gray suit with the shimmer to its weave--his hands at his sides, as if on damselfly wings he seems...

Back Roads.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Back Roads East Hampton, Connecticut It wasn't like anyone read the stuff, like you could say poetry and avoid classmates' sneers, their what-the-fuck-lots. It was like this: a secret course after school, empty chairs ...

The Bath.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Bath Saratoga Springs, New York Waiting in line to pay, I know I know nothing. Before me stand a curious clique of Hasidic Jews. Curious, until the teller issues his Orthodox instructions-- men to the right, women...

The Year 2000.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Year 2000 The question Mrs. Handler asked us second-graders to answer (even those of us from across the hall, just visiting that afternoon) involved figuring out our age at the turn of the century. Having been born ...

Swamp Genesis.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Swamp Genesis No Tree of Knowledge fuming fruit and nobody itchy to eat it, no spasms of hibiscus and orchid. Just the apt greenbrier, the Jurassic fans of palmetto, the pink of the swamp azalea rooted in rank...

In Praise of My Daughter's Insolence.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... In Praise of My Daughter's Insolence I got my mouth washed out with soap for sass. I still recall the lick of Dove's white lye and recollect the awful aftertaste that counseled me to hedge, to qualify. George...

The Moth Collector.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Moth Collector Moths were better than butterflies. They swirled the same porch light every night until they died. He loved the ragged hankies of their wings after rain, the weighty thud of polyphemus, as...

The Man Who Moved.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Man Who Moved Sooner or later it all ends up in the back of a borrowed truck. He wedges a mattress between table and bookcase, ties down lamps and full-length mirror. He accelerates slowly, taking his...

Why knowing is.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Why knowing is together with Matisse's Woman with Hat Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never seen that quality of light before even...

That subject again.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... That subject again It turns out that subject again: death and the three-headed dog chainsmoking barflies and all that whirled-about smoke. Palpitations in between loss of balance the precipice over which those who...

The Devil's Hour.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Devil's Hour Just inside the gates of the park was a little bluff below which suburban houses were stacked like bibelots from the Limoges Museum across the shelves of hillside streets toward a vanishing point that...

An American Tale of Sex and Death.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... An American Tale of Sex and Death Before I'd felt the promised kiss of either-- pink tongue of one, feathered breath of the other-- I knew their kinship among lords of life and fealty I'd pay from pocket or heart, or...

The Habit of Its Fit.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Habit of Its Fit Love is made up of a great many things and I am not clever enough to explain them. But I know that it is also habit. --Jean Renoir Ever since I took off my wedding ring something floats...

The Art of Distance, V.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Art of Distance, V After lunch, on the side porch, the uncinched wooden leg in a muddy boot stood by the edge of the bed. Freed from the second boot: a full-length human leg, denim on white chenille. The other ...

Heart and Soul.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Heart and Soul Heart Such beauty in the world, 0 mutinous giver-snow on the rose, the golden river... Soul You loiter now, old fox, old friend, but you know what happens in the end. Heart I know the honey in the...

Our Hearts Transcend Us.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Our Hearts Transcend Us The first time he says I love you my tongue clicks on my teeth in involuntary dismay or is it pleasure and I wonder what to do and what is love anyway and he says We know what...

The Persistence of Memory.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Persistence of Memory Decades past his power to zip a tight spiral, yet whenever our quarterback spots me, after news of his latest divorce and most recent companion, he asks if I remember our winning...

A Fable.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A Fable On a shallow of the frozen lake, in a heap as white as gardenias, a whooping crane lay oblivious to sun-glistened snow, the murder of crows floating in like braille. When two white feathers tumbled ...

In Time.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... In Time The great bull pine felled by the wind lay across the game trail down from the ridge to the creek and had in all the years since been leaped, scratched, and scrambled over-- tenderized, hoof-chiseled--...

The Afterlife of Moose.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Afterlife of Moose for Stephen Dunn As the moose is obsessed, relentlessly and with little or no variation, with food, safety, and procreation, I am myself obsessed of late with God, though by God even I am...

Lipoma.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Lipoma "What is that?" she asked, a graceless and childlike revolted fascination in her voice. It was just below my right elbow, a lump on the meaty rump of the forearm's underside, like the nippleless tit of a...

In Pursuit of Monsters.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... for Graeme Hughes, 1961-1998 It was the special water. At first, we believed it was only the two of us that had made this discovery--by the time we realized we were wrong, it was too late: the commitment made. My partner, Les, found...

Citizen of Vienna.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... THE PHONE RANG AT 11:10, almost certainly Lucy. I was watching the news report on a four-alarm tenement fire downtown, a harrowing, gorgeous sight. The tulip of flame, three stories high, lit the night for blocks. A cigarette had been left...

Refiner's fire.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... SO MANY THINGS AT ONCE, like this--: the woman I live with is white, which, I realize, counts as an accomplishment for some people. For me it suggests that they must have been desperate down there, at the church. Someone must have had a vision....

D. H. Lawrence, working poets, and political correctness.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... AT MANY UNIVERSITIES in England and America, D. H. Lawrence has been dropped from the curriculum. Lawrence is seldom if ever taught as a major figure to whom a semester is devoted, is only marginally included in survey courses, and only here...

Heaney at play.(Seamus Heaney)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... IN COMMENTING UPON THE "geometry" in the poems of Seataus Heaney's Seeing Things, Darcy O'Brien "cannot help but think of Bart Giamatti's reminder to us that the proportions of a baseball diamond are perfect and that the word paradise comes...

The comfort of birds.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... MIDSUMMER'S HEAT LINGERS LATE into evening, and lightning bugs speck the sky. An owl moans. At night I could be anywhere. It is only during the day that I am truly home. I have taken to rising for the birds and listening to their song for...

Lost and found.(Randall Jarrell)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... SOME OF US WOULD BE a great deal happier about the release of No Other Book (1999), a volume of Randall Jarrell's essays selected by Brad Leithauser, if it hadn't occasioned the same old judgments lifted momentarily from their brine. One taste,...

Steinbeck's light.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... "YOU'VE MADE MY LIFE BRIGHT," John Steinbeck said, to his wife Elaine, on his deathbed. He liked the word "bright," perhaps because it rhymed with "light," a word that was, for Steinbeck, the much more important one. Light shines out...

Songs of myself: the poems of Norman Dubie and Larry Levis.
March 22, 2002... The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems, 1967-2001 by Norman Dubie. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. $30.00 (cloth). The Selected Levis by Larry Levis, selected and with an afterword by David St. John. Pittsburgh: University of...

A conversation with John Updike.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... This interview took place before an audience at the Cincinnati Short Story Festival on April 18, 2001. JOHN UPDIKE IS NO STRANGER to interviews. In his career he has submitted to many of them, and he has written, particularly in his short...