The Southern Review articles from September 2004

The Southern Review archives from September 2004

Acknowledgments.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... OFF AND ON over the past two or three years I've read a bedtime story called Bread and Jam for Frances to my now five-year-old daughter, Marina Gobnait. In the conclusion to that book, the eponymous little badger, who until that time has...

What to Keep.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... What to Keep After the operation, after the casket closed some years later, your father's glasses, which he had sent you through the hospital to find Of course the powdery water-damaged portraits of...

Fatherhood.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Fatherhood It's been a tough summer. The other night before bed I was pouring a drink of heather cream from the big brown bottle, shaking it into the shot glass to get the very last drops. We were all in the kitchen,...

Pneumonia.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Pneumonia And then the dark fell and "there has never" I said "been a poem to an antibiotic: never a word to compare with the odes on the flower of the raw sloe for fever..." --Eavan Boland, "The...

Wonder.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Wonder November, and Cinderella's coach is moldering among the windfalls. Sunken and puckered by frost, still it holds much of its former grandeur--the vaulted ceiling, the gold leaf burnished by October sun. Here,...

Close Quarters.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2004... Close Quarters (After hearing Jim Wickwire's account of the ascent of K-2 and the loss of a companion while climbing Mount McKinley) Having never opened a can of sardines, I decided to have a look,...

Canterbury Tale.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Canterbury Tale The flowers she buys at the grocery spray from a jam jar, though we can afford crystal now. When in April, twenty years ago, on a campus sidewalk, stopped by a glance of sunlight on a bell tower,...

The Side to the Wall.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The Side to the Wall Considering this is the last Christmas tree in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, it's not bad. I recall all of the childhood lots, white breath on the night air as gloved, rough men held trees by the horns...

The God of Georgia.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The God of Georgia Are you washed in the blood? --hymn didn't like the senior prom, knew it was about rubbing bellies to saxophones, and afterwards in the...

In the Land of Three-Legged Dogs.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... In the Land of Three-Legged Dogs Coming back down here is coming home to all our dead dogs--not the cocker puppy in the basement dying of distemper, or the brave mongrel convulsing under the house, snakebit-- but...

Remote.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Remote Spooky how, drinking late at night, I always seem to flip to a channel showing GWTW just when Scarlett shows up at Tara, near Jonesboro, where my parents got married. She thinks if she can just get home, ...

An Undertaking.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... An Undertaking In memory of Charles Anderson Harrison (1955-2002) 1. The Call The undertaking of his suicide a task beyond understanding exerts its force like a huge dark...

Amish.com.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Amish.com Your site for everything Amish. --amish.com will soon offer shirts made entirely of buttons. They'll clack and rattle, those shirts, and need to be oiled and fed thread,...

The blessing.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The blessing There's a coal train to the west, it whistles twice, and the faint pulse of wheels dreams down the valley. I went for drinks yesterday with a minister who believes we are fallen but not doomed. He drank ...

Founder's day.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Founder's day I introduced John Adams to the Pacific and likewise I am sure. The book by McCullough, not the book by Chinard. Carried it in December from Michigan where it's cold to California where it's not...

Football at the School for the Deaf.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Football at the School for the Deaf By poor Paul's barbershop, I meet his eyes. They're clear enough, he's steady on his feet, he seems unruffled by my snapped-off stare, and by the after-appraisal I make, sideways, ...

Riddle at the Infertility Clinic.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Riddle at the Infertility Clinic In the reception room a basket overflows with artificial roses. Some bloom scarlet month after month, others remain furled, tight buds or blind eye sockets mercifully seamed shut. I...

Name & Address.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Name & Address When I call my father long-distance on a Saturday night, he knows my voice and doesn't need, as he did yesterday, to ask me my name. He says, "Don, I'm in a bit of a jam.'"...

Ground Transport.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Ground Transport Above the clouds, the weather is always clear, sunlight's glare off the leading edge of the 757's wings, endless blue of the sky's glass dome cupped over us,...

Translated.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Translated Crowned with an ass's head, you get to partner the queen, the queen of fairies, the queen of the company. Stumbling as in a swoon, as...

Chaconne.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Chaconne In the chaconne the steps are elegant. The couple walk like gods, almost fallen, in fragile majesty. Their arms extend permitting her sweep near the ground, her orbit justified by gravity, her planet ...

Gulls.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Gulls The cry of a gull, very like that of a flying baby. You look up startled, walking to the quay. Wind whisks a fringe here and there on the sound's surface, which from a distance you may confuse with gulls, their wings...

Ebony: John Wilkes Booth Recites "The Raven".(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Ebony: John Wilkes Booth Recites "The Raven" In cold Louisville to commit eloquent murder and be praised, he rehearsed before the mirror-- Richard's winter of discontent, Macbeth, the Moor. His train the week before...

At Tea.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... At Tea To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak... --Edna St. Vincent Millay Yes, I sit at their table, but my dead speak to me ...

When the Movers Took the Bed.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... When the Movers Took the Bed they left the pan full of change I kept beneath it. Emptying my daily pockets, I'd put wadded bills on the dresser and coins in the pan. I'd skim enough quarters from the stash to...

A Palm Print in Lascaux.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... A Palm Print in Lascaux 1. I, too, want to reach behind the stone veil, To follow the rabbit down its winding hole Into the whisper chamber, bosses like sails Billowing in an earthen wind,...

To Acedia.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... To Acedia ... like those who go down to the Pit. Razor of nothingness, ash Of soul thrice burned, Thought with its armies Of malice turned inward, Pygmy soldiers Overrunning the field. ...

A Shadow of My Former Self.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... A Shadow of My Former Self darts like fish shadows in thick water, fleet light by day, motley by night, or as a furtive walker hurries on the river's other bank, dipping...

In Thrush Light.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... In Thrush Light How was it that day the car canted along those dry, blond hills, courting the road's camber as the needle dipped toward empty and we whisked through manzanita, live oak, madrone, the landscape...

Feeders.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Feeders When he asks why her daughter's crying, Barbara says, "One of her turtles killed the other ones. Look at it there!" Plesiosaur neck, thick olive limbs, spotted pancake shell, the turtle swims the way a leopard pads:...

What the bird says.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... JIM CUTLER HAD FLOWN DOWN TO ASHEVILLE to be there while his father died but it was taking longer than expected so they'd given the old man morphine and now he was seeing things. "Not things. A bird." "What kind of bird?" "How the...

Ackerman in Eden.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... TOMORROW, HE KNOWS, THEY WILL COME BACK with their Thorazine and their rules, but now Ackerman, alone of all his kind, stares into a pool of water and thinks of spearing fish in a twilit eddy of the far Euphrates. For tomorrow, when they...

Annie Taylor and the horse from the sea.
September 22, 2004... YOU CHOOSE THIS TIME," she tells me. "Something fancy." From the pile of sprinkled laundry I unroll my favorite, a dresser scarf embroidered with heaps of shells at each end, ribbonlike seaweed edging, and a fierce lively shape like a young...

To give ghosts the finger.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE this story, believe me. Hell, even I don't believe it, and I'm its only teller now. I can tell you, though, sitting in that dim cell across from Jebediah, listening to him tell it, there was no question. I believed...

The days of the Peppers.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... MY MOTHER HAS FALLEN IN LOVE. We talk about this while we feed stray cats in the parking lot of Culpeper General Hospital, where I work in the cardiac ward. "It's silly, I know," she says, "at my age." The cats come gliding out from...

Hunters.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... KATE ANSWERED HIS PERSONAL AD in late summer soon after she'd been told for the second time that she was dying. She had always thought of herself as shy, not the type even to peruse such ads. But the news had been jolting, if not altogether...

Taku.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... THE TAKU IS A HUGE RIVER, and begins in huge country. It headwaters in the largest remaining unprotected roadless area in British Columbia, nearly five million acres. The Taku, which leaves British Columbia to exit near Juneau, is Alaska's...

Lion's teeth.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... HERE'S ME, AGE SEVEN: a bone rack tanned to dust, a mosaic of mud from kneecap to toe--a salt flat cracking under sun. You can play music on my ribs. I've always been fluent in mud, but here, its crumbling patches and crosshatched fingernail...

The hungry art of William Goyen.
September 22, 2004... The beautiful is always strange. --Charles Baudelaire "Exposition Universelle 1855" In dammrigen Gruften Traumte ich lang... --Hermann Hesse, "Fruling" ...

John Clare for the twenty-first century.
September 22, 2004... JOHN CLARE'S POETRY, WHICH PRESERVES FOR POSTERITY the English countryside of his pre-Enclosure youth--its folkways and seasonal changes; its sinewy dialect ("swaily" for shady, "drowking" for drooping or wilting, "crankling" for winding,...