The Southern Review articles from September 2001

The Southern Review archives from September 2001

The City of God.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The City of God for Ann Now we knelt beside the ruined waters as our first blood, our bulb-before-bloom, unfurled too early in slender petals. Now we were empty. Now we walked for months on...

Fair Weather.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Fair Weather Past waffle cones, past tacos in a bag, fine grease and dust floating in a powder over the center of the fairgrounds, where heavy metal thumps from the Koaster Kids, where Tilt-a-Whirl spins its small...

Under the Lamp.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Under the Lamp When you leave I take my cereal onto the step. A huge luna moth bats the grass. An eye floats inside each wing. Nearby are two egg-yolk bodies, wings striped yellow and pink, several white petals on...

Eucharist.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Eucharist This morning along the corniche I hear the arkasus seller, clinking two brass plates together, hawking licorice juice. The zils clack open and shut like clams, big as saucers in his right hand: dum...

Threepenny Opera.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Threepenny Opera The elderly modern-dance instructor And his elderly wife are dancing In top hats and tails, doing a Kurt Weill Number as old as their marriage. They've reached that age when the body Is...

Crusoe.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Crusoe When you've been away from it long enough You begin to forget the country Of couples, with all its customs And mysterious ways. Those two Over there, for instance: late thirties, Attractive and...

Pleasure.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Pleasure At the Art Institute, she's kissing him, he's kissing her, centuries so far, or hours, one era to the next. The terrible, earnest age with all its crucifixions passing finally--here!-- beyond the dazzling...

Song in Spring.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Song in Spring The young who shield their eyes from the sun, in their teens or just out of them, aren't all that young. They take big steps. They think What now and Should I and Fuck you. The Fuck you is the easy part,...

The Old Mathematician.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The Old Mathematician The mathematician, almost too feeble to walk, walks down Salisbury, over on Stadium, up Rose or Robinson. No bird is an equation, not the one in the tree, not the one in flight with its wings...

Full Circle.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Full Circle ... and my daughters from the ends of the earth --Isaiah 43:6 You think them weak, the way they'd shatter With pleasure. You think to protect them-- To frame them in wood, or in metal, like mirrors,...

Lily.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Lily In the groove and still, In my twin bed and quite still, Or else twitching, on and off And on like a light, I roamed... the night pure Excitement, cocaine And underground, secure And...

A Maiden or Two for Every Man.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... A Maiden or Two for Every Man --Judges 4-5 1 Deborah assembled her medicines, packed her simple robes, and came to the field of battle where Sisera, puffing in silk and a feather cape lined with hyrax fur, ...

Punishing Delilah.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Punishing Delilah If I be shaved, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man. --Judges 16:17 1 For years Delilah's legs were rich, luxuriant. The hair made such dark,...

The Same City.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The Same City For James L. Hayes The rain falling on a night in mid-December, I pull to my father's engine wondering how long I'll remember this. His car is dead. He connects jumper cables to his battery, ...

The Flame.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The Flame Her letters doused, the sticky sap of Dear Baby on my tongue, her apology, the electric twine of ink about to be burned, I crouch as embers rise bright as maggots into my face. I am in the backyard ...

Sleeping Woman.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Sleeping Woman so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. --Pablo Neruda Yes, cigarettes are metaphors for sex or solitude itself; whatever is live and deep and gone....

Half-Life Studies.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Half-Life Studies 1. A handful of powder can break a city's back, a scatter of sleet, cloudlight, luminescence of salt. At the taxi stand, a driver from Senegal practices thinking in English. Etoile, he whispers....

Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer ... if the painter shows that he observes more than he reflects, we will forget the limitation and take his work as we take nature, which, if it does not think, is yet the cause of thought in...

By Road, and by Sky.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... By Road, and by Sky Hit and left for dead, this porcupine. A mess of flesh and entrails in a smear of blood. It jerked a little, then tried dragging itself away. My father pulled over and rummaged in the trunk for something...

My Mother Falling Asleep.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... My Mother Falling Asleep When my mother was eighteen, she escaped from that tyrant, her mother, and the brothers she had to raise, ending up five years later with a husband who'd left her and my two brothers ...

To Know Mud.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... To Know Mud To know mud is a life's work I cannot begin without them: three pigs, thick in rinse of almost April, lucky to be large and not alone, eyes filled up, noses doused. Look at how they make it ...

Exhortation.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Exhortation My office floats on the ocean-- a cement platform and glass walls bobbing over foamy swirls. The hulking oak desk weighs down the north corner, tilting the floor. In town, people scurry to leave...

Multiple Sclerosis.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Multiple Sclerosis When my girls and I arrive at the doctor's office, I am wearing someone else's shoes, high heels with tissues stuffed in the toes, and coat, a too-short sable fur. I leave the coat, shoes, and...

Sometimes I am victorious and even beautiful ...(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Sometimes I am victorious and even beautiful... Sometimes I am victorious and even beautiful-- as when I go down to the pond in the half-light and wade out into the black water, where I unloop the taut lines from the...

Their Wings.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Their Wings In summer the bats fly like dots and dashes over the dark and sullen pond on the shadows of their wings. But once, in the morning, one of them lay on the road, struggling, so I...

Military Checkpoint.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Military Checkpoint On the road to the San Pueblo rancho we are stopped by military police at a roadblock. Every truck is searched while we wait by the guardhouse and answer their questions. La Laguna, when they...

Swinging Maria.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Swinging Maria After throwing up behind a pole in the Galeana square, I call home. Ten pesos--one penny--per minute at the farmacia's pay phone. I sit in the glass booth, its doors folded around a wood bench, and dial....

Hera Has Her Say.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Hera Has Her Say The women here Admire my beauty, though they persist in describing Me as matronly. When I slip on my voile sundress, I can still hold my own with any of these young Things. I know it's the...

A Siren Repents.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... A Siren Repents These conversations with my past make me know I loathe frailty in others because I hate it in myself. I don't mean to keep you. I will let you go. Back to your habit of castaway loves. There are those, ...

Landfill.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Landfill We're mute queasy for breath at the gravelly turnaround the hill of rags and slops the slick mash a yellow bulldozer hunching treading the pulpy rubbish tearing with its claw at the lath and plaster...

Rooster.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Rooster My daughters watch him strut rust and sulfur catch and pin the little hen his wing a plush cape concealing her how the body doubles over like a tree the wind yanking at its root. It is his coop his...

Proximity.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Proximity I have forgotten my skin, misplaced my body. Tricks of mind, a teacher once said: the man with the amputated right arm convinced he could feel the sheets and air-conditioned air touching the phantom skin....

Walking to Carcassonne.(Short Story)
September 22, 2001... RICHARD PURVIS WAS WALKING OVER the Pyrenees from Spain just as his father had more than fifty years before as a young lieutenant in the company of a band of Spanish guerrillas. He supposed his father had traveled mostly at night. He and the...

Puppy.(Short Story)
September 22, 2001... EARLY THIS PAST SPRING someone left a puppy inside the back gate of our house, and then never came back to get it. This happened at a time when I was traveling up and back to St. Louis each week, and my wife was intensely involved in the AIDS...

Creatures of Habit.(Short Story)
September 22, 2001... Chickens THE HONEYMOON WAS OVER before it began. The sweep of bridal frenzy--a wave of white tulle and bone china and petits fours--receded, leaving a litter of soggy napkins and a half-eaten cake. For Lisa the planning had been like a...

Smoke, Ice.(Short Story)
September 22, 2001... 1. THE DOCTOR SAID THAT my eye drifted. Lazy, he said. A lazy eye that must be taught-he said this to my eye itself--like a dog. Then to me: "You will make this eye act correctly if you are a determined young man. And are you?" ...

Where the Dog Is Buried.(Short Story)
September 22, 2001... IN PRAGUE, WHEN LIZZIE AND I asked an official about taking the train to Presov, she said, "I do not advise it. It is a filthy method. The only way to Slovakia, if one must go there, is by plane." She made a face like she'd just lost a filling....

Must a Novel Have a Theme? (Essays and Reviews).
September 22, 2001... MY TOPIC TODAY COULD BE thought of as a sort of continuation of Alice McDermott's charming and trenchant discussion of elements that must be left out of writing--she mentioned the dangers of theme mutating into moralism. I will try to add some...

A Writer's Account.
September 22, 2001... William Styron: Charlottesville IN APRIL OF 1966, WILLIAM STYRON agreed to give a reading at the University of Virginia from his long-awaited new novel. Already a subject of discussion in Harper's and Esquire as well as in literary...

Cult.
September 22, 2001... EARLY IN APRIL, VICKI, the children, and I spent a weekend in Princeton. Saturday morning Eliza and I watched the Princeton heavyweight crew row Harvard. We stood at the finish line at the north end of Carnegie Lake. Spectators near us wore...

Some Notes on the Remembering of Remembering: Eudora Welty (1909-2001).(Column)
September 22, 2001... FOLLOWING THE ANNOUNCEMENT Of Eudora Welty's death in Jackson, Mississippi, on July 23, I found myself recalling, for reasons more personal than not, I suppose, four interrelated events of her later career. One was the publication in 1971 of...

Notes on some recent poetry.
September 22, 2001... TOO OFTEN CRITICS SEE RICHARD WILBUR as an object lesson, or as a place in the geography of poetry, rather than as what he is, a reflective and nuanced poet whose writings never quite reduce themselves to the role critics and other poets have...