The Southern Review articles from March 2004

The Southern Review archives from March 2004

Semicolon.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Semicolon Not quite comma, not quite period. Simple schizophrenic of rhetoric's loony bin. Norman Bates of the old syntax motel. A door half closed, half open, still. Undeclared...

Abattoir.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Abattoir The first time I heard the word I imagined some faraway room too lavish and exotic for the likes of me. Mounds of velvet pillows, beds carved and fluffed and canopied, fringed shades to ease the...

Language: a Sentimental Education.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Language: A Sentimental Education How it makes and breaks you. That tenuous stringing together of letters and sounds. Mean and amen. Casual and casualty. Good and god and dog. How it can turn on you. ...

Unmentionables.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Unmentionables Odd how my mother's incessant utterings seemed only an attempt to unsay the world her eyes, her ears, her nose, her ever-flitting hands bore witness to. Unthinkable, unspeakable, unheard of, she...

The Poems I Have Not Written.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Poems I Have Not Written I'm so wildly unprolific, the poems I have not written would reach from here to the California coast if you laid them end to end. And if you stacked them up, the poems I have not...

Sound Check, Lower Manhattan.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Sound Check, Lower Manhattan Just a jumble of songs and jackhammers and roaring garbage trucks, people talking or shouting, a bitterly thin old man lying L-shaped against a building in SoHo saying "What am I gonna...

Kachinas.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Kachinas They are the ancient essence of the world, of animals and plants, of water, stones-- who dwell six months in nether darkness, swirled among telluric powers, roots, and bones. Then, at the winter solstice,...

Five White Birds.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Five White Birds Having seared the sky, the sun--a brazier-- smolders through the crumbling clouds upriver; to the east, rich mounds of smoky vapors, signifying rain tomorrow, drift on. Five white birds rise suddenly,...

Wolf Moon.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Wolf Moon This moon seeps through, leaves no clue where it's going or where it's been, poker-faced through five decades of fall. It holds me fast in its orange tint, hints new love, the kind that staves off ...

The River of Sclerosis.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The River of Sclerosis I stand near the confluence of two tame gods named Olentangy and Scioto, though all day Ohio's been swept by rain. What would I give to be made whole again, bathe in streams that once assured me?...

One March Animal's Desire.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... One March Animal's Desire Warm days, we punch the snow with our footsteps, leaving the nights' cool mercury to harden a crust. Better to travel early, before the sun sends down the weight of its heat. If we were otters--so...

Grass Studies.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Grass Studies If we can't be aether, I thought we might settle for grass, and why not slender wheat, which serves as forage for wildlife? Less populous than bluejoint, it wasn't grown in Europe like canary--as...

Lenten Stanzas.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Lenten Stanzas I. And how should I wait? Should I list My transgressions--I was cruel, I lied, I let Anger overtake me, I said I knew when I did not. I turned away too quickly. And how should I pray? Should...

Advent Stanzas.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Advent Stanzas I. Are we always creating you, as Rilke said, Trying, on our best days, To make possible your coming-into-existence? Or are you merely a story told in the dark, A child's drawing of barn and...

Money.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Money Money is time given permanent form--though of course only for a time. --Howard Nemerov The backs of dollars open in the green inscriptions. A dollar's center opens, a window of white space. The...

Photographer Unknown. Neuvilly, 1918.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Photographer Unknown. Neuvilly, 1918 The light survives, exploding the north wall, Splintering the vault above the side aisle, Beaming upon the immobile white columns. The church, surprised by so much radiance, ...

The Glass House.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Glass House Where should I cast my sorrow If not here beneath these maple trees At the lake's edge, with a wishing stone The cold weight of my heart, Wishing what has come might be undone? In the glass house...

What I Learn Weeding.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... What I Learn Weeding A dandelion root can grow two feet long. You don't forget unearthing one--shocking as a donkey in an old French postcard. But mostly, love, we pull their heads off to achieve our shallow vision...

We Live in the Largess of Our Nickle-Dime Moments.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... We Live in the Largess of Our Nickle-Dime Moments Even Adonis, that gored fertility boy who bled flowers--expected by the underworld's Shadows to lament the lost Venus Aphrodite-- confessed he missed the sun, stars, and...

Samuel Gorton.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... letter of Roger Williams to William Blackstone, Providence, RI 1644 Days ago, passing through Shawomet into the Narragansett country, I heard or thought I heard a conversation among the trees, one of those times when...

The boat.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... the boat he built it sure that it was huge in a clearing of the pines and afterwards stepped back from it all wood beneath the trees and then he took it to the docks under the white gull-cries where the...

Going to the doctor.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... going to the doctor I found his office down the long unswept hall years after opening the book to dial the number where once inside I felt an absence of air when the psychiatrist appeared his hollowed cheekbones angled...

Dusk.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Dusk for Tom and Dodie Consider dusk that drapes the forest in a monk's cowl, that silences the free-for-all and fashions for our souls a sleeping place, but knows to create one last, delicious treat: a...

On Being Asked, Have you ever written about Jacqui's paintings?(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... On Being Asked, Have you ever written about Jacqui's paintings? I've stolen three titles from her and so many shades of ecru that I gave up and translated them all as longing, You decide if that means yes or no. Her...

Primer for June.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Primer for June Is it enough to say that fireflies lollygag above the lilies, and ply the fields with sparklers, and drift about the sky like lazy comets? Should I add that day lilies got their name not by closing at...

Ode to Beach.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Ode to Beach This is the sea, then, this great abeyance --Sylvia Plath, "Berck-Plage" I repeat. The sea heaves and lumbers to shore in one long drum roll after another. All day / all night the same five waves...

Good-Bye, Moon.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Good-Bye, Moon The moon has nothing to be sad about, staring from her hood of bone. --Sylvia Plath The moon is cold-shouldered these days, these days, restrained by gravity's tug of love that pins her to the...

To Whom It May Concern.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... To Whom It May Concern Two windowless weeks of heaving fifty-pound crates of greeting cards and already in that warehouse I was senior grunt for no one lasted long and no wonder I said to the boss's son as he...

Handful of Keys.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Handful of Keys 1. Fats Waller meant the piano's, the ivories he astonished in his 1929 solo as if playing all eighty-eight at once, big left hand striding, big right hand swinging. But I mean all these office...

The Future.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Future Because, married so young, with three children and another on the way, I lived far from the still, beautiful place where writers and scholars were photographed in the early 1960s, I learned each detail of it...

Getting Married after a Tour of the Manhattan Adirondacks in Central Park.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Getting Married after a Tour of the Manhattan Adirondacks in Central Park The tour guide pauses to explain the logic of the pond, its man-made curves and local geese at ease. A breeze slips through the maples reddening...

Gettysburg Reunion, 1913.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Gettysburg Reunion, 1913 They faced each other across the cornfields: old men in tattered uniforms, holding rifles that no longer fired. The charge was given, and they ran, as best they could, stumbling...

In Time.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... In Time I heard the house around me like an old familiar body, a shell of shine and damp. In bones I moved through its rooms, through storms, second thoughts and watched it shift, separate in seams-- ...

Reading the Leaves.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Reading the Leaves Across the creek, vines of fog twine around poplar, white oak, distance dimming gray, the world grown close and older--and here my uncle's work boots dirt-clogged and dew-dark as he follows ...

Waiting.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Waiting There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. --Alfred Hitchcock I turn on the radio and listen to Janet Leigh admit in these forty years since Psycho she has only bathed, never...

At the Chinese Art Exhibit, after Your Talk of Suicide.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... At the Chinese Art Exhibit, after Your Talk of Suicide from Hibiscus under Pine Tree a Ming dynasty handscroll Mother, does it help that centuries ago T'ang Hsia-min, too, lamented decades of mistakes, In the dark...

Nether Stowey.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Nether Stowey Dear Coleridge, I'm a stranger in your house and do not think of you as lunatic or some nut nodding off to opium, but a man feeling too keenly the touch of other human beings, who needed air, cold...

Carmelite Convent, Mexico DF.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Carmelite Convent, Mexico DF Past portraits of sedate saints at desks like grade-school principals, past dormitory cells where nuns once whispered prayers to iron bells, then sank to wooden biers and slept, we...

Absorption.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Absorption After Mark Rothko Stare at a color till you become the color and red fields with fiery barriers surround you. Painting absorbs you, and your world grows fuller. The canvas reaches out to you. Get closer,...

Canal du Midi.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Canal du Midi We enter, and doors lock behind us, gears grinding like reluctant secrets buried so long they've been forgotten on this ancient pathway linking sea to sea. Entombed in shadow, mute stone chills. The...

Refuge.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Refuge There was nothing, it seemed, to see That day at Great Meadows Refuge As I walked alone, but lily pads like Yellow cups holding thin September Sun. Lovely, yes, but where was life? That's what I needed,...

The Lighthouse and the Turtles.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Lighthouse and the Turtles The restaurant converted from an old lighthouse was one of my parents' favorite places and, after about the age of five, mine too. Just inside the front door, a long, dark green tank with...

Phone Message.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Phone Message for That Lady away on a visit In shop for repairs, our hi-fi's gone Dumbstruck for the third straight month: Our well-tempered joists and timbers Forget their known vibrations; our stalled air ...

The Moth Chorale.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Moth Chorale In Switzerland, just one half-timbered floor above sheep flocks and cattle's backs, whole families, hushed in the updrafts of their warm beasts' breath and lowing, slept. Young, we boogied to the...

Fortemente.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Fortemente In the silent, scarcely holy night, high shrieks, howls, then wailing wild chorales of ululation bring glad tidings that the half-breed coydog pack's old hunters have come back to their home kafuffle,...

At the Villa.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... At the Villa Sun-glazed waters, calm ahead. Our boat's wake, Spreading behind us like a rumor, shudders The stateliest mansions mirrored on the lake. Water polluted. Swim at your own risk. When we take drinks out...

Lasting.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Lasting "Fish oils," my doctor snorted, "and oily fish actually are good for you. What's actually wrong for anyone your age are all those dishes with thick sauce that we all longed for so long as we were young and...

Variations on a Theme by Ammons and Li Po.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Variations on a Theme by Ammons and Li Po Last night on the National Geographic Channel I watched an hour-long program about the mountains of Hawaii. Bright green in the extreme, and all the way to the top-- like...

These Days.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... These Days These days I live on top of a piney ridge just outside Atlanta, and this November morning, at daybreak, I sauntered onto the back patio with my first cup of coffee and there it was: that crimson sun creeping...

Holding On.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Holding On I am thinking of them tonight, locked in their embrace, waters dark and cold. Do they have any warmth to give each other? Late yesterday, near exhaustion, they lay in the slough overhung with reed and pond apple,...

Anhinga Pairing.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Anhinga Pairing When the male anhinga's bright blue eye ring comes, when he displays his fine feathers, raising his tail, waving the wings, she begins to pay attention. Then they swoop and glide together near the...

I Came to the Everglades with a Grief.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... I Came to the Everglades with a Grief This is what I have learned: weeping for beauty replaces weeping for grief. Stunned at first by the blue heron's crest, the purple gallinule's iridescence, grief now creeps as surely...

The Blind Men and the Elephant.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Blind Men and the Elephant Six blind men came upon an elephant. I have never seen an elephant, said the eldest; neither have I, said the others. A tautology if I've ever heard one, remarked Hassim the scholar as he...

Reading Sidney Lanier in a Starbucks.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Reading Sidney Lanier in a Starbucks How All's in each, yet every one of all Maintains his Self complete and several. --Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) How is it, compulsive rhymer, that in one poem you proclaim...

Prenuptial.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Prenuptial It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. --Psalm 127 Lying in bed with you, not sleeping--sleep the metaphor of all I want...

Almost there.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... YESTERDAY A FARMER WANTED ME TO FIND HIS LONG-DEAD DOG. Sixty years ago, when the farmer was fifteen, he'd buried the dog, Patches, at a far corner of his family's farm. "That dog was the only critter ever loved me without a reason," the...

Minding the store.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... IF HE HAD NOT BEEN FORCED TO SCROUNGE through the Depression, Henry Sotile might have been the founding genius, the Rockefeller, of quick-stop shopping. As a matter of fact, in his old age he was a ringer for old John D. He looked like a...

My favorite dentist.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... YOU ARE MY FAVORITE DENTIST. You don't look on my chart and ask me how my job is. You never duped me into listing my hobbies, not six months ago, and not six months before that. You never even tried. You say, "Look at this. Anything new?" and...

Castelgandolfo.
March 22, 2004... FOR MY BIRTHDAY LAST WEEK MY HUSBAND GAVE ME a silver CD by Charlotte Church, that little Welsh angel, along with the once-a-year gold-boxed Godiva chocolates tied up with their little elastic gold string. From our daughter Tasha, away at...

Jesus wept.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES THE OUTHOUSE IT IS ANOINTED. Haloed and shaken and char-dark, it is God-glad but not set aflame like the overhanging mulberry tree, and from that day it always smells like buttermilk and dead roses. We call it the Light...

Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph's: a Cambridge recollection.
March 22, 2004... BEING AROUND POETS IS NO EASY BUSINESS. Their special dialect may leave non-poets baffled and excluded. At least, that was my dilemma while living at St. Botolph's Rectory, Cambridge, in the mid-1950s. The young poets who resided there or often...

The honest conversation: on reading George Oppen.
March 22, 2004... THE METAPHYSICAL POET REVEALS HOW THOUGHT--eternal, infinite, ethereal--is grounded in the world. Such disclosure occurs in language, and language comes to the mind, to the tongue, through perception as finely tuned to the exterior world of...

Surface tension.
March 22, 2004... TO PREMISES, BOTH TRUE: 1) American fiction is understated, quiet in its demeanor, often somewhat astringent in its effect. 2) American fiction's signature characteristic is embellishment. Whether messy or gorgeous, our stories and novels gain...