The Southern Review articles from September 2000

The Southern Review archives from September 2000

Book Marks.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... I AM WORRIED ABOUT THE WOMAN. I am afraid she might hurt herself, perhaps has already hurt herself--there's no way to know which of the return dates stamped on the book of poetry was hers. The book, Denise Levertov's Evening Train, belongs to...

Grass Widow.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... NOT QUITE HALFWAY THROUGH my husband's twelve-week stint away from home, I have hauled out the featherbed and started sleeping on the floor, with my two dogs. I know how pathetic this sounds, so I make a face at myself when I tell friends, when...

One Family Line.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... ON THE TOP OF MY great-great-grandfather John Lane's limestone grave-marker, erected in eastern North Carolina in 1868, is a set of carved hands grasped in friendship. Who is this patriarchal John Lane shaking hands with--God? If I think of my...

I Was a Teenage Beatnik.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... I WAS EIGHTEEN AND ATTENDING the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Attending may be too strong a word. I was more often absent from than present in my classes, which included Nuclear Physics and Symbolic Logic, both of which I was flunking....

Focus.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... FOCUS IS JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING to the surveyor. Squinting into the transit's eyepiece and turning the knobs to center the cross hairs and magnify the details, you apprehend only a tiny framed circle of reality. It's like peering out of a...

After the Deathday of Ted Hughes.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... It goes on. As is and as ever. New England fall Foliage beyond the station sign reading Mystic Over the smaller Connecticut. I had woken in New London To Hopper's sun-washed Sunday brick-and-green. Steel-blue Sea under...

Dark Hay.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... June grasses had burgeoned to monumental hay: slabs and beds Printed in eights by the baler's sledge following its green coil Of concentric windrows like stone spirals at New Grange or Radmilja To a last comma near...

Mass Grave, Padalista.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... A tiny mound. Nine fresh graves. For the second time In two days in the killing fields, Inner tears... *********... It was clear That little Afrim, commemorated on the hill behind, Had been buried here. Mother and...

Millennial.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... August: choruses of sheep-- gargling bass and tremulous tenor of senators blathering on about an empire it's too late to save. Broken polyphony in which each complains at cross-purposes to each, not seeing ...

Nettles.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... By tumbled walls, from rubble piles and round all the apocryphal dens and rotting logs of childhood, in the profane and holy thick of things, they spring-- electric, tensed to the leathery, green tips of their...

Haskell at Gettysburg: 1863.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... The summer heat pressed down, despite the gray sky's mizzling rain. We waited, where hours later the dead would sprawl in scattered ricks, where the merely damaged would wait in line, impatient as bettors at a ticket office, ...

Talk Show.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... The man who has never cheated on his wife is outraged at their infidelities. This isn't love! he screams. How in God's name can they live with themselves? It has not yet occurred to him how the thought that we are blameless ...

Contemporariness.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... No bear pie or stew in the new Joy of Cooking, nor porcupine, but in 94951, a spa town in California, a bakery's named Bovine. No matchbook souvenirs from restaurants, nor for that matter Strike Anywheres. Now...

Food for Thought.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... I've caught fish, sorry to brag, been ecstatic with their size-- a twenty-pound salmon, a gallo taller than my height-- cod, blues, a cierra, a large striped bass, trout-- to name a few. In the morning dark in...

View from Lee's Camp.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... White-haired now, he played as a boy where the fireplace bricks still stood and piles of stones that supported the floor still described the shape of the tent, before bulldozer blades had swept them away, before the...

Lions.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... When a male mounts a female in heat, she agrees more or less to lie flat in flattened grass long enough to feel what he has to offer-- a few good thrusts, and then he throws his head back and yells at the...

Namesake.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... I was named after the doctor who delivered my mother from me my birth certificate says I was born colored the date weight the stamp of the old city hospital the doctor's fancy scribble my parents' names...

Apotropaic.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Bend of morning, and the moon's ladle is still hooked in Sunday's sky. Sun, too, brightens the willow, casting a shadow of our house on the grass. A shadow that soon will lengthen. A long time's passed since I was young ...

Judas Trees North of the House.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Red-violet buds: a sight no density of woods can mute in early April each year: among the trees, their color pervading the smallest spaces between gray trunks and branches and hushing all fear...

Prostrate.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... When the barber sees my hair his eyes widen, his ancient clippers pause in the air, humming like flies' wings. I bring my father, hobbling with a cane, among these old Mississippi farmers wearing overalls and white...

Dimensions.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Three horrific shrieks, Pure terror, And I look up, And it's a sharp-shinned hawk Chased from its eucalyptus perch By a mockingbird. You've seen something similar: A chihuahua barks its walnut-sized ...

Belle Creek.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... for Greg Pape On a small sandbar, A snagged, limber root Is tossed up by the current, Then plorks the water, Up and down in a motion Regular and steady as a high-- School bandleader's baton. An oriole...

Jasmine.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Tragedy's where we live and what we are, beings like us, she said, not just us two. I noticed jasmine spilling into the air from out of time. A call from streets away, the ship's horn in the harbor, all this was there, ...

Vermeer in Misery.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... These it was easy to provide with elegance from the sidelong candor of their looks that made the spots of pearl-gray on the dinnerware resemble glowing pools under tongues half glimpsed through parted lips, so much they...

Saskatchewan.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Maybe it's just my own bad memory, but I keep going back to scary places like North Miami Beach, Saskatchewan, where the half-breed woman at the Tradewinds Tavern next to the boardwalk, under the sign that read DON'T...

Bound.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... (Old Castlemaine Gaol) Burnished arms in shackles are twice conveyed to the yard, the canvas masks replacing glares and scowls, as eyes through holes disown their shares in this routine of dying, wait, and delay. ...

The Room.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... For two years it lay almost unentered, almost unoccupied, except for an insect-hatch of empty cartons. Then something spiraled, stirred in a comer, demanded. And so came the sanding and painting, the washing...

Optimism.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it...

Times Square.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Baby, it's cold outside. The lake is frozen and the ducks are gone. Even the hookers are wearing trench coats over their fishnet stockings; they stand along Third Avenue opening their vents for passing cars, and...

Phone Call.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Maybe I overdid it when I called my father an enemy of humanity. That might have been a little strongly put, a slight overexaggeration, an immoderate description of the person who at that moment, two thousand miles...

Deep Canyon, Late Night.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... When my husband drives the dark two hours home, I sit beside him and throw a road into the void beyond our headlights, survey moon, taillights, road signs, stars to lay its bed down. And I clarify dangers: deer...

The Half-Life of Unstable Elements.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... ALONG THE RIVER THE GRAIN ELEVATOR sits in the shadows of an abandoned button factory and a dried-up creamery, and farther down, houses teeter over the bank on stilts. In sunny weather the houses look charmingly ramshackle, on overcast days...

Hush in This Heat.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... I DON'T UNDERSTAND MY FATHER. He says our kind of town, which is rural, is the saving grace of America. The people here have what it takes to keep a small place feeling important, he says, and the government should keep its big nose out of...

A Man Wrapped in Gold.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN my Uncle Henry said something I used to puzzle over: "Your mama thinks your daddy's a man wrapped in gold." I was holding my sister's hand when he said this. We stepped through the grass toward our house. Mother and...

Virtue.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... DAYS AFTER HER MOTHER'S SUICIDE, twenty-five-year-old Adriane Gelki determined to lose her virginity to her boss, Garrett Hughes, and she went about preparing for this the same way she had, ten years earlier, found God: She read up on it. She...

Adultery.(Short Story)
September 22, 2000... FOR TWENTY YEARS JOE EARLY encouraged his mother to divorce his father. They were no good together. Fought blow for blow. Not physically, understand, but sniping, from the bedroom, over the kitchen table, outdoors, in company. And then, just...

The Bottle Factory.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... The summer after high school, seventeen, I hired on at the bottle factory in Nutley, New Jersey, to pack the lines spun out by middle-aged Italian women operating silk-screen machines. The work was dumb: unfold a...

Lady Dragonfly.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Flag Dance, Drum Dance, The Quadrille, and many a nation dance--each family evolves a dance to call up their ancestors, a rite for celebrating the old nations from which they hail.... From the cradle to the grave,...

The Fairfield Gnomes.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... They grace the Gothic archway to the school As they have done for more than sixty years. The Gnome of Writing prints his alphabet Raised up by marble pen from marble page, The building blocks' block capitals that spell ...

Song: The Kiss.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... We were walking through A department store in Paris, Escaping the rain, The sort of French rain That changes in intensity If you look at it, Then changes back if you don't. You went to lingerie, And I to...

Salmon Seen from Above.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... It's a cliff I'm on, where the woods rip away to shale, and the indomitable, inevitable sumac swells around the cottage, where the wind is a form of reason, where the great lake begins or ends. Thirty,...

Fog.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Between you and me there was fog. I was driving to you, and there was fog Where I was, and where you had agreed to wait. Above the highway, the on-ramp enshrouded, The traffic unseen, the signs appeared too late to...

Foreshadow.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... In the Alzheimer's unit where my stepfather is, a man in a wheelchair looked at me-- You sure are a pretty woman. The compliment could have been aimed at my mother, seventy and still lovely. She no...

Lesson.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... When I was six and ready for school, My father said, "You know nothing. Nothing at all. Put on your sweater And make yourself fit. You've much To learn before the day is over." His sentences were blows to the head,...

The Family.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... The boy wept to see the bull calf's horns Nubbed by the saw in his father's inept hand That wept, too, but cried blood: The red tears welling from the torn head, The hand reweeping the red tears. Oh, the tirade from...

Permanent Record.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... They sit in the dark recesses of drawers all over the world: a card, a half sheet of paper, recording the facts of the day the train jumped the rails or when she stayed in bed too long or forgot to water the fern and a...

Jet Lag.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... That first flight I did everything wrong, skipped two meals, downed two bourbons, then coffee, coffee, coffee, read cover to cover a thick guide to Oxford. All around me, open-mouthed bores snored. Off the plane,...

Pat O'Brien Knocks Me Up.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... That first waking, naked, in the narrow bed in the tiny room in The Parsonage, I found a startled-looking woman backing out the door, saying, "So sorry. I'm Pat O'Brien. I'm to clean your room." "I'm all screwed up," I...

Door to Door.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... I know this suitcase doesn't look like much, but stroke this leather. That's history. The man who enjoyed this before me was a legend. He owned a car whose name you wouldn't recognize. That's the kind of man he was. They...

Earth Hymn.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... The tines caked with mud delight Him he says all morning and then as the April afternoon Softens he turns the earth and pours in humus Mixing the soils together to make one good soil I cannot open the earth and not...

A Dairy Queen Ice Cream.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... DQing with the wheels, not even May, Tatie, Sherline, and Kali rest and lay Back on the old Dodge Twister for a while, Munching on Blizzards, eyes shut in a smile, Sunlight on faces, pierced and tattooed skin, ...

Ants in My Bathroom.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Their red-gold army marching down my bathroom wall found my orange Conus quercinus by smell. I saw it, lying on dead coral between two motus off Moorea, where my bride Kayleen and I were snorkeling while our guide, Jacques,...

My Soul at the Nude Beach.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... I. Today she's naked, fishing in a hat. I'm only sure she's female when she stands, and then there's the way she puts one hand up, assesses the waves with an odd salute. Hers is the only pole that tips. She...

Walkabout 1971-1996.(Fiction)
September 22, 2000... Australian, directed by Nicolas Roeg, featuring "a ravishing Agutter" and expanded by five minutes for its rerelease Leonard Maltin In this movie, when men's eyes whore up a skirt like the camera does Jenny Agutter's, they're...

The Ravenswood.(Poem)
September 22, 2000... Yellow tint of nicotine around the scarlet lacquer of her nails. The El lurches forward. From the plate glass I can see the engine sway the curve & bend the shadows of the cars against the Rosehill cenotaphs...

Death, Beauty, and Redemption.(Review)
September 22, 2000... TOWARD THE END OF HIS POEM "Elegy for Matthews," Bruce Weigl writes, "... and then you/ smiled the way you did/ inside the place that exists/between the kiss/and the last breath/where you had loved/ to dawdle." These lines might be the heart of...

Working the Field.(Review)
September 22, 2000... STANLEY PLUMLY HAS LONG BEEN read as a Keatsian poet, a maker of smooth sounds that build toward a sense of overbrimming suspense before a fall. With Keats, he imagines life as composed of emotions that billow and pass, like the airy gravity of...

Writing Southern Literary History.
September 22, 2000... NORTON'S NEW ANTHOLOGY Of The Literature of the American South and Michael Kreyling's Inventing Southern Literature raise provocative questions about the nature of literature and how we study it. Kreyling's book typifies recent trends in...