The Southern Review articles from March 2005

The Southern Review archives from March 2005

Editor's note.
March 22, 2005... My wife Melanie and I were driving home to Baton Rouge from New Orleans just before Christmas, the mission having been a quick trip to Pottery Barn to pick up a rug for one of the rooms in the new house here. We'd checked out the store online,...

Three letters: Robert Penn Warren.
March 22, 2005... THE THREE LETTERS THAT FOLLOW will be published in the third volume of Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, with William Bedford Clark as general editor. * They appear here by permission of Warren's literary executor, John Burt. The editors...

The best sort of teacher.
March 22, 2005... ALTHOUGH I WAS NEVER FORMALLY ENROLLED in any class he taught, Robert Penn Warren was one of my teachers at Yale. A Scholar of the House in my senior year, I enjoyed what they called the "freedom of the university," so that I was excused from...

Elk-Spotting in Church Park: An Eschatology.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... In February 1974 I met Robert Penn Warren while preparing a descriptive bibliography of his works. He was most kind and supportive of that project, published in 1981 by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. Warren and his...

Walking the dog with Robert Penn Warren.
March 22, 2005... Grenoble, 1971 THE AIR WAS SHARP AND CLEAR, and by early October snow already capped the mountains. The Warrens collected us at the train station in a brand new beige Mercedes. "We call it Meet Me in the Green Glen," Red said. "It cost...

Warren in Thibodaux.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... In the spring of 1985 Robert Penn Warren appeared at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and read from his verse as the first Marie Fletcher Lecturer in American Literature. The university inaugurated this lectureship in...

Places: a memoir.
March 22, 2005... I AM WRITING IN MY FATHER'S STUDY in Vermont, the little wooden cabin--perhaps "coop" would be the more accurate word for the single room and screen porch--perched on a wooded knoll over the stream and swimming pond. He had this study built in...

A note on "Uncertain Season in High Country".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... UNCERTAIN SEASON IN HIGH COUNTRY" was one of the last poems Robert Penn Warren wrote. Composed after he had completed preparing his New and Selected Poems (1985) but before that volume appeared in print, it was one of only a handful of poems...

Uncertain Season in High Country.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... UNCERTAIN SEASON IN HIGH COUNTRY By the descending mountain track, soundless At damp impact of foot, a few Pine-tops are tall enough to lift Into the hover of mist. Horizon, Encircling the clotted gray dubiety of light...

Sunflowers in a Field.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Sunflowers in a Field Sunflowers in a field. Goldfinches everywhere. They gorge on seed. They rise To rest along the power line, then fall Like drizzled lemon drops, like lozenges Of candied yellow light. Two...

Ode to Rafflesia.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Ode to Rafflesia for Suzanne Robertson I, too, am weary of poems for flowers. Weary of grape- vines and panorama, of moon in water, pine and birch. Yesterday I would...

Across the Dardanelles.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Across the Dardanelles fifth century BC Furious weather destroyed the partially built pontoon bridge, 674 boats long, Xerxes was throwing from Persia to Greece ...

Conversion.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Conversion That's a gorgeous piece of beef, the guests always said with feeling. A roast, bougainvillea pink in the center and a drizzle of gravy hidden under a napkin, after a Sunday park walk. She...

The Poem as Samurai.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Poem as Samurai Dangers are seasonal: too much green, too little. If only the blade could open the belly without the mess. As if the hole could gently speak of bees and hard blue skies. In your humble house...

Hot coffee, summer.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... SATURDAY, AND FRANCO WOKE UP ALL VINEGAR. He didn't want the kids climbing into our bed. He didn't want the kids getting lippy. He wanted only the paper and some hot coffee. He made the coffee, but the percolator's dying, so the coffee was bad,...

At Marx's grave.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... The guidebook said it wouldn't be easy to find. I was killing an hour in London, a student on holiday, my first time abroad. I remember the sun could almost make a shadow. The path took a turn and then there was Marx's marble head, looming,...

Scientists Claim Fish Feel Pain.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Scientists Claim Fish Feel Pain Since Father Adam, Mother Eve dropped their lines, we've told ourselves that nothing else can ache. August dawns, a child miles from Cleveland--Lake Mohican--I'd thrill to strikes...

Sclerosis Poem.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Sclerosis Poem In comedy, it's someone else who hurts. You're tragedy, the pain's all yours, your fate the public, stumbling faux pas. The MRI affords no room to dance. Cat's got your tongue, arms and legs jerk on, ...

Chamber Music.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Chamber Music Every day some memory in me dies and finds its life without me, in this room beyond my room, and takes its place in the ensemble--plucks pitch, props bow--and begins. All night I listen, the bedspring...

To a Nightingale.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... To a Nightingale After the cries, after the night of pain after the tongue that gave the cries was gone, you were this: a girl, who wore the ruined shell of a girl--our timeless, our recurrent Philomel. And what...

Appalachian Lullaby.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Appalachian Lullaby First song--apple-branching from the first green place, smelling of mulch and apple blossom, recalling bees and memories of horses to the hive or hands that held them; first light of morning like...

The Backyard.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Backyard A way to keep us in our place. A way to say not-neighbor by half. But blood tracks of the half-thing (Yorkshire terrier) torn dragged from Mrs. Yamamoto's yard this morning into my rough marigold...

Spellbind.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Spellbind for Dante on his tenth birthday, with apologies When the surgeon handed me the squalling package of your life I acquired a mother's imagination. If you were out of my sight for a minute I...

Consenting to love: autobiographical roots of "Good Country People".
March 22, 2005... What would you make out about me just from reading "Good Country People"? Plenty, but not the whole story. --FLANNERY O'CONNOR, The Habit of Being THE YEAR 2004 MARKED the fortieth anniversary of Flannery O'Connor's death from kidney...

A Hundred Wild Geese.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... A Hundred Wild Geese Ma Fen, early twelfth century Each curved neck tells me to learn more about geometry, telemetry, reeds. On this scroll, pill bodies suspend in the snowy...

Grief Daybook: After Charles D'Orleans.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Grief Daybook: After Charles D'Orleans Heart, who's there?--It's us, everything you've seen. --CHARLES D'ORLEANS It's the third hour in this clear light, a tiny thing covered neatly in seconds, pacing...

Me and Hopkins.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Me and Hopkins Sometimes when I write poetry I am not up to it at all. My hands are deep under the Aegean where an expedition couldn't find them. My body is behind the stone in the tomb and Easter is a long way...

Feast Day Elegy.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Feast Day Elegy Here is the feast day with its large hands and mouth, its river sound and clay color, the town concerned just now with bathing and gathering wood. I won't be here again, this year of three thousand...

Distal.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Distal As I walk along St. Philips, the dusk fills my lungs and the bells of six o'clock make tiny equations in the air. On my corner the lights of the church set it on fire, the houses surround in a kind of kneel. ...

Dying in the Waysong Living.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Dying in the Waysong Living I set the sky's attune by lying in a copper dirt, singer to snails & rootsman, tongue in cracks the river will arrive in. Salmon drying in the aftermath of pools after the sun of Azrael...

Break.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Break for L. P. and J. K. It's not that I remain a willow for the cloaked roads, or the Mississippi they traced, splattering gnat-clouds, or that it was tragic like Athenians could have understood it, but that...

Fires.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... ALREADY THAT the war was drawing closer, close enough on some nights to see in a thin blaze over the northern horizon, and we heard that Seoul was about to fall when the pyobom, the leopard, began to appear in the valley. Each morning we woke...

Just Beyond Auden.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Just Beyond Auden It was by St. Mark's Place where Avedon took Auden almost alone with the skeleton fire escapes. It was near the back of an empty vegetable truck where the poet faced the camera killing any shred of hope ...

Physician.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Physician The stitches were spindly and black, insect legs down the ridge of my nose, thirteen exquisite bows. They smelt of death and surgical spirit, tiny fissures of dried blood. Where had my doctor learnt...

Pattern.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Pattern I nearly walked into it, the spider's web hung in a sunlit clearing between two trees, imagined instead the wreckage of silk filaments against my face. This one glistened intact, ...

Sometimes.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Sometimes 1 While the rain ticks the hour on the tin roof and the heron strides slowly on wet leaves by the waterline, I can feel the slip and run down the drainpipe, the sloughing and sucking of all things--the...

In the Next Seat.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... In the Next Seat Greyhound Bus Station, Nashville A man sits in stink. The little girl asleep against his chest has wet them both from Atlanta through Chattanooga and he's as scared to wake her as you might...

Tree House.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Tree House A fort hung in midair, a penthouse clubhouse, a private boys' heaven lookers-up could only behold the floor of-- that's what we wanted to build in pine woods next to David's house with...

The culvert.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... IT WAS LATE IN THE WINTER, the time of year in that northern place when the snow lay in a hard, dirty crust pocked here and there by frozen footprints. We lived in a mining town, and the smokestacks belched soot high into the sky, and the soot...

Narrative interiors.
March 22, 2005... IN A SIMPLE SENSE, my paintings are realist scenes: interior and landscape, still life and portrait. They are attempts at understanding the links between my sense of visual harmony and my emotional response to a scene. Recently I have been...

The Omen.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Omen Pushkin had a beautiful wife. A man named d'Anthes was flirting with Natalya. Pushkin challenged him to a duel. On the day appointed he turned back to do something. As everyone knows, once...

The Afternoon.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Afternoon Having arrived at this place in the day, you wonder what to make of light stealing across counter tops, vases, walls, light so far into the known it feels like erosion, old glacial shift. ...

Vine.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Vine That year, at the party we threw for our friend's birthday, before I brought the cake in streaming with flame and before the dancing started, before we stood around, ice clinking in our glasses, and talked with too...

The House of Marriage.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The House of Marriage for CZ It's the scariest house on the block, to be sure. I've been warned but I go like mischief, wandering hallways, opening doors. The stillness is enormous; no one's lived within...

Double Birth.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Double Birth for my sister Suddenly the hours gaped into a hole we all fell through, the fearful moment when you were nothing, an absence, and all there was was a wheel slowly turning. Your...

Hard Days.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Hard Days Oracles babble: it's coming, be ready, Deliveries from fate can't be picked up later, may explode while waiting on your doorstep. The days spool out their varicolored terrors. We try to...

A blue to the shadow's black.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... THE OLD MAN'S VOICE had a slippery way, sliding around corners, and when it found Kid beside the barn, on his elbows in pleasant sweat amid the morning's pile of split wood, he held his tongue, as had become his custom. This autumn had carried...

After Having Sex on Palm Sunday, Some Clarity.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... After Having Sex on Palm Sunday, Some Clarity Luke 22:14-23:56 Here--have faith--later, pulling the string on the basement bulb, or later, the night falling down on us like the shadow of a hill, my husband...

Sermon on the Mount Today at My Failing Kmart.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Sermon on the Mount Today at My Failing Kmart Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 6:17-26 Jesus, look again at us huddled and shuffling, your gimp, lazy-eyed, pierced and homeless-- today the retarded men have arrived in a van. ...

I Consider Doubting Thomas at PetKare.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... I Consider Doubting Thomas at PetKare John 20:24-31 There is only love at PetKare. These girls hold empty hermit crab shells to their ears to hear the ocean. These boys have caught crawfish at a pond and want to...

My Enemy, Unloved, Has Only Struck One of My Cheeks.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... My Enemy, Unloved, Has Only Struck One of My Cheeks Luke 6:27-38 Nearly soulless today with one burning cheek. Proud, I rear it for all to see: red, shining, taut skin, a hard apple; my jaw, too tender, refuses to chew....

No Difference Between Things of This World.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... No Difference Between Things of This World for E. Thomas Stuart Down he runs from the yellow-jacket hill, Down from the sound of water rushing in a rock, Down and shattering the leaves, leaping the fallen Trees with...

The Shield of Aeneas.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Shield of Aeneas He sees the future twice, once in, once back from hell, peering out from Virgil as from a yearbook, the war years, the clean-cut high-school hero gone to soldier, fierce anthems in his...

Ixcuintli.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Ixcuintli The national dog of Mexico, hairless save for a tuft on top, curly toupee or stiff gray mohawk, stands its ground and won't yield. Rufino Tamayo painted its jaws dwarfing its...

Ghazal, Ghost Written.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Ghazal, Ghost Written One wishes that ghosts were well-bred enough to know they needed an invitation to return. Queued like Englishmen at the bus stop, umbrellas folded, waiting their turn. The date it happened,...

Chance.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Chance I is a drunken driver careening through stoplights and retirement savings as it sings "God Bless America," getting lost on the way to your home but always finding it in the end. is as...

Flight.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... FIRST IT WAS THE NAMES THAT WENT. Names of neighbors, grandchildren. Sometimes the names of her two daughters, her only son. She knew their faces, of course. The daughter with the sharp eyes, inspecting her gestures, her walk, pressing her...

Mistral I.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Mistral I Two donkeys graze in a meadow of wild golden buttons. Scents of eucalyptus and honeysuckle mingle in morning air. Distantly, down at the shore, rise the high voices of children discovering things. ...

Mistral II.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Mistral II I gave myself to the mistral, which had shouldered its way down from the north, leaping the careful fields of France, skimming the Alps, running the flat of its hands along the Rhone to careen over this stretch...

Stations.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Stations History's braided with memory here at roadside: it has all been provender and materia medica, and may be again, the rose hips' dispensary, cattails my daughter stirred to pancake batter, those fiddleheads we...

Ocean Effect.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Ocean Effect This morning the harbor's surface looked oily, as though a boat had gone down, and I counted the draggers just to be sure-- the Holy Child, Curlew, Avaricious, Azore Rose and the others, none missing,...

Forty Pines.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Forty Pines Now we are open one way to July heat, one way to the winter Atlantic. What parable of change will heal these spaces? Necessity says I should blame the turpentine beetles who drilled some of these...

Leslie Fiedler, ahead of the herd.
March 22, 2005... IN A 1984 INTERVIEW with David Gates of Newsweek, Leslie Fiedler remarked, "The typical pattern with one of my books is that when it comes out everybody abuses it. Ten years later they're still abusing it, but they've begun to steal ideas from...

In a Small Town, On a Street Corner.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... In a Small Town, On a Street Corner Back then I longed to warm my hands near the fire. Then something caught. A sleeve. A spark. Danger draws us, people say --the idea of getting caught on a street...

In Ohio.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... In Ohio A thousand miles away fires burn. Nearby a man with a wife and two kids lives in a split-level house he hates. At night I wonder what a house contains. A blue-and-white bowl from China. Wood-block print ...

Me in the Absence of Women.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Men in the Absence of Women What they don't know of themselves defines their beauty, the intimacy of men as unfathomable as the blue depths of the sea. A boardinghouse up the Carolina coast, as the story was told, a man ...

City of War.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... City of War Sarajevo, 1993 The way a hand curves to the clavicle it loves, so a city is remembered for its crescent swirl of arches and bridges. A pantomime of spirits and ditch water. Smoke climbed the door of...

Our Mortality.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Our Mortality A trace of sulfur on the tongue, the aftertaste of adrenaline, what made me leap the first time I saw a pistol twirling in the air, a metal flash curved to the palm of my nightshift replacement at the old...

To the Outdoor Wedding.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... To the Outdoor Wedding All come, forgive, and bless the dogmatic overripe bride who insists she will be married in the garden of her dead mother, though the guests and wedding party hiss and shiver as the light rain turns...

Suet soot suit.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... THERE WERE THRONGS of new widowers around town that year. It was as if these men had spawned in the marshes along the Hudson, then shambled into Poughkeepsie fully grown and quietly dressed, to occupy offices in obscure firms and live along...

Middle, Nowhere.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Middle, Nowhere Don't argue. This is where we're stopping. Where we'll snack on whatever's gleaming in this tree. What good the sweetness, what use the flesh, if not to inch us into dream? Don't answer. Have...

The Place.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... The Place She'd set the urn of him among his black books--codes & seals, ships & bridges-- then moved him behind the glass door with the vitamins and pills. A windowsill seemed a good spot for a while, later a...

Only a Speck in the Mind but It Was Burning.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Only a Speck in the Mind but It Was Burning In Friday's episode, unconsoled by a fifth marriage, Tiffany was about to lock the real priest in the confessional so he'd have to hear everything. But first she'd stopped to...

Agent of Light.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Agent of Light If falling is the fear, we must most love the rock that straddles ledge and air-- the one that dares a quaver of earth or a loosened boulder from above to knock it free, though what is liberty if...

Strand.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Strand Invisible, before our angle's right or the sun comes out of shadow. What's threaded glints eternal, even at night in sallow rooms where we toil for hours in a straight-backed chair at a cluttered desk,...

Sweet Drug of the Backward Drag.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... Sweet Drug of the Backward Drag Let the moon be my elixir, my liniment the calm. Let the mountains lit mauve at dusk act as sedative to spirit, the sighting of swans gather like powder in dreams, and the lynx...