The Southern Review articles from September 1996

The Southern Review archives from September 1996

Ordinary moons. (poem)
September 22, 1996... i At bedtime the child says, "Father, Tell me a story." The father calls on Q-tips, a bar Of soap, spiders, water gurgling, and so on. ii In the living room, the wife draws a light bulb out of the heel Of a...

Field work. (poem)
September 22, 1996... He laid her down on the lawn beneath the elm and spoke to her in the voice of God: "Good dog. Good dog." I pinned her down with both my arms. Her heart repeated fear against her chest. The tumor had grown...

Crossing the Ohio at Sisterville. (poem)
September 22, 1996... The ferry's old wood railing warms beneath my hand. Across the river, sycamores, crows. From where I station myself to watch the crossing, the sun drags its net through a shoal of jewels alongside starboard. Summer...

Riven. (poem)
September 22, 1996... When you left, I went back to Thunder Rocks, down the ridge off the eroded trail through narrow ravines of cold air, following light as it sank into the earth, drawn to the essential heft and mass of stone towering...

Daughter's villanelle. (poem)
September 22, 1996... She saw a man with black hair. Said to her friend, Probably my dad, facedown in the alley. See? That guy there. You paused outside her bedroom door, startled by what she'd said. You, a man with clean black hair, ...

Succession. (poem)
September 22, 1996... We are flying inside the storm, rain stretched taut across the windows like piano wire. We are turning, though it seems the clouds themselves circle us, bandaging with their white gauze. Our belts are secure. Hands do not...

Heart pressing further. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Mustard greens and a little garlic sauteed in oil, a few seeds of chili, pasta added after and tossed. Outside the steamed windows, the sound of rain, and within it a raccoon's walking, every hair of his...

Salt heart. (poem)
September 22, 1996... I was tired. half-sleeping in the sun. A single bee delved the lavender nearby, and beyond the fence, a trowel's shoulder knocked a white stone. Soon, the ringing stopped. And from somewhere, a...

Lament for the lady felons. (poem)
September 22, 1996... As we zigzag and circle the castle's base, we seem to be crawling endlessly up a road snake's furrowed back, rising some six hundred feet into the cloud-wisp eagle high-flier's upper air zones: Fort Charlotte...

Jogging with Oscar. (poem)
September 22, 1996... When I take my dachshund jogging, boys and widows gawk and stop tossing balls or lopping limbs off shrubs. They call and point at long, potbellied Oscar trotting like a rocker horse, tongue wagging, dragging on grass when...

Transvestite. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Going out naked into the snow late at night most unnaturally I mean why so silly? I bet you never did that Julie or even in the rain women don't they must wear G-strings and minimal makeup...

Policy. (poem)
September 22, 1996... A friend of a neighbor visits on a Saturday in spring, and my father sets two ones, a five, then two dimes and two cents on the table in the kitchen of his new four-room house on Dibble Street in Seattle, and...

Local tae kwon do. (poem)
September 22, 1996... These little ones, maneuvering in postures of defense, levering this forearm to that blow or block, walk out the cold November dark in Korean decorum. Barefoot on the grainy asphalt (feet pale oblongs ...

Anniversary. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Strange to think of John Keats's birthday and the American Halloween--there, an oblong of stony damp, here the parade and tramp behind the resurrected dead to beg or threaten trick or treat. He couldn't eat the...

Elegy. (poem)
September 22, 1996... For ten years he was the only baker in Seattle, the only one related to us, I mean, taking hold in our minds as a white-dusted solitaire in the four A.M. streetlighted dark in a coastal city we'd only heard of. ...

The Dry Tortugas. (poem)
September 22, 1996... The seaplane lifts off in a surge of spray like a heavy duck, and the gentleman in suspenders yells "ee-YOW" in triumph, and we're all together now, the old radical from Wisconsin in the blue Lenin cap and Windjammer...

Calvin. (poem)
September 22, 1996... He used to catch cicadas, their green-veined, transparent wings, their bodies blunt as one joint of a thumb; he used to tell me: "That's where its stinger is"--pointing to the ovipositor-- the idiot, and I'd nod, and...

The city of heaven. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Joshua Stewart of Syllable, Georgia, stood out on his front porch one July watching an eighteen-wheeler fly over as it circled three times and landed in his soybean field. A truck-driving angel heaved down from...

The dancing at Cana. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Jesus said to them "Fill the jars with water." They filled them to the top. He said to them "Now draw some and take it to the head servant." They took it. When the head servant tasted the water turned...

New room. (poem)
September 22, 1996... This house, a hurtling thirty-three years old, Bears crowded freight--the woman who built it Was killed soon after in a head-on wreck The day she got her first driver's license; Her husband and daughters left it cold ...

Lament for Bukowski. (poem)
September 22, 1996... It isn't only the Great Bards who "perne in a gyre" believe in "the dark gods" and court the Muse wearing condoms: it's also a guy in his undershirt scoffing a hot dog and six-pack in a crummy LA...

Balance. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Circular ear ornament inlaid with a mosaic of turquoise, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, red spondylus shell, and green stone, surrounded by a shell ring and border of gold beads. Chimu culture, northern coast of Peru. ...

From your mouth to God's ear. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Off the cliff, into air, the mother shout blackberry-jam thick, stirred down into a soothing lick on the needle-pricked thumb, from God's mouth to your ear: Stay put! The clouds won't, that's for sure: the rabbit, no...

Petting the scar. (poem)
September 22, 1996... for Alicia Ostriker You know what? I don't want a brave death, faithful children mopping up after my body, sweet thing, nubbly fissures and skin so soft it's silklike. Let my daughter wail at the side of her lover's...

Hummingbird. (poem)
September 22, 1996... "Where do passions find room in so diminutive a body?" asks Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in Letters from an A American Farmer, shocked by a finger-long power bobbin's hot current:...

On the steps to Roquebrune.
September 22, 1996... There are small sharp stones placed in the steps' patchwork mortar for traction on winter ice, and it is this detail underfoot and cinematic that stops me on the steps to Roquebrune. Not that I have forgotten her...

Where Cerritos is. (poem)
September 22, 1996... for my son Page So little did we know his Spanish we thought he said Demente when asked his name, and it was under that outlandish alias that Clemente worked as painter's helper beside his friend Luis, whose...

Deep in Dordogne. (poem)
September 22, 1996... There is a human cave I once inhabited for part of a morning on a limestone bluff deep in Dordogne. Other rooms were vacant in the town far below at the Hotel Cro-Magnon, but I wanted to sit on the...

New Year's Eve A.A. dance. (poem)
September 22, 1996... This I must admit to you: when you put on your dress clothes, I stood in the hall and recognized the sober appearance of a suit that counted twenty years ago, a slip of the past you tried to slip past me....

At the grave of E.A. Robinson. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Decades of vague intention drifted by before I brought small thanks for your large voice: a bunch of hothouse blooms and Queen Anne's lace and four lines from "The Man Against the Sky." My poems, whatever they do, will not...

Institutional blue. (poem)
September 22, 1996... In the welfare waiting room the woman cradles her jaw in her palm, back molar aching in time to the piped-in music. She's on her way to the county fair, free tickets and all her children in tow, to soak in the...

Late in the teacher's lounge. (poem)
September 22, 1996... So I ask, How many of you know someone who's been shot? And half the class put their hands up. O April, bless them-- O bless me, tulips, you cuds of color, I'd like to swallow you whole. And I'm just goofy...

Before penicillin. (poem)
September 22, 1996... The doctor steps into the shack. Light is December dusk. Sleet clouds bunched up. All the beds are here in this small space, pushed up against the wall, and across the room in the shambling light, he can see...

In the ladies' room at the Honeybee Bar and Grille. (poem)
September 22, 1996... Jean sticks that stuff in her arm again. Makes her eyes glint like a scot-free fox. But man-- she's not. Tipples on Lodonia's flask, and Lodonia's murderous. Her uncle raped her sister, right, so Lodonia's copped a...

The music lesson. (poem)
September 22, 1996... A TV clip from the '50s: Leonard Bernstein twitching his shoulders through a peppery rendition of William Tell Overture, then telling his audience of children, "I know you think this is about cowboys and Indians, and...

The anniversary. (poem)
September 22, 1996... "Are you a fan?" The shop owner's yearly grief. "Trouble with his medication" did him in, but this Elvis scuffing black velvet is still a boy, the J-hooks of eyeliner above a '50s grin could sway a teen Priscilla from The...

Voice: the entertainer. (poem)
September 22, 1996... I'm fifty-two years of age which means My shirt has a hard time covering my gut And under my chin and jaw the skin's starting To hang like a wet washcloth and I'm singing About love. There was a time and a place when...

Hettie Smith. (poem)
September 22, 1996... When Hettie our maid would quit, she'd tell My mother that as an employer she was "Unfeeling, unclean, and unholy." My mother would Start to blubber and protest her love and if I was there I wondered who was holy In...

"Nine-year-old boy is world's youngest hit man." (short story)
September 22, 1996... This guy Ivan over at the Black Sea Social Club on Sixth and Avenue A says that when he went shopping as a little boy with his mama in Moscow he'd go to the one big department store in town and he'd stand in line and sometimes it'd be for...

Julia and Nellie. (short story)
September 22, 1996... Heaven and Earth have sworn that the truth shall remain forever hidden. --I. B. Singer, "The Dead Fiddler" To avoid confusion, I must tell you that although this "true" story will begin with an account by a real person, Adah Williams of...

Soon. (short story)
September 22, 1996... Martha's mother, Elizabeth Long Crawford, had been born with a lazy eye, and one morning when she was twelve her father and the doctor sat her down in the dining room at Marlcrest, the Longs' place near Augusta, Georgia, and told her they were...

Pavane for a dead princess. (short story)
September 22, 1996... At an earlier times, Mrs. Miller would have resisted, but now, sitting here in her apartment overlooking the Gulf, it was as natural as . . . as, Mrs. Miller thinks, breathing. Her mind goes back to an evening years before in Memphis. One of...

The mountains of the moon. (short story)
September 22, 1996... The book was a Luganda grammar. It lay open on the splintery desk Alec Wardlaw had knocked together from their packing crate. It had been open for days to this lesson, to a page where the list was forty-seven words for seemingly surreal bits...

Plums and Ashes.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in an omnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

Mose.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in an omnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

Second Sight: Poems for Paintings by Carroll Cloar.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in an omnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

Above the Tree Line.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in angomnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

Sweet Lorain.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in an omnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

Song.
September 22, 1996... It seems a given that whenever two or three poets are gathered in an omnibus book review, their work must be shown to be connected; they must be compared and perhaps seen as creating harmony (or dissonance) in subject or form, or as...

The storekeeper. (contemplations of time and death)
September 22, 1996... It interests me, the variations in flow and rhythm that conspire to make change. I used to picture the changes of seasons and events as the result of some incremental movement at earth's center: some perceptible straining against tension until...

Lucky Jim as I remember him. (Kingsley Amis)
September 22, 1996... Kingsley ami's death at seventy-three leaves me with old images and the need to sort through them. His talent, though not huge, was real, and like that Renaissance pope who warmed to the papacy, he had the wit to enjoy what God gave him. An...

The good-enough mother tongue.
September 22, 1996... Sitting in the Hallway on wooden chairs or benches were perhaps a dozen other young men. All were dressed in black suits and holding Bibles, saying only a little to each other. I was twenty -- two years old, waiting in the federal building in...

Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems.
September 22, 1996... For my generation Understanding Poetry (1938) by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren was all we knew and all we needed to know about reading and writing poetry. Therefore, when Warren discovered in 1979 a powerful, original poetic voice and...

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.
September 22, 1996... A teacher of literature once said that his idea of hell was having to read fifty Emily Dickinson poems at one sitting. Though he professed to like and admire her work, he found her voice so mannered that he thought her poems should be...