The Southern Review articles from September 2005

The Southern Review archives from September 2005

Recital.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Recital Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. --Psalm 144:1 I The Original Poem My hands, french-braiding my daughter's hair before her recital, are suddenly my...

The Skin under My Wedding Ring.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The Skin under My Wedding Ring It's Clara Bow's face in It, 1927, the year my grandparents were wooing and wedding in anonymous and remote places where the horse had only recently become a novelty and life ...

Coupons.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Coupons The cashier leans forward to examine the expiration date. Here's my mother's squinting face in silent concentration and memory, adding up my father's paychecks, subtracting the bills, scissors...

Clean room.(Fictional Work)
September 22, 2005... So PEOPLE ASK YOU what you do, and you tell them you work in a clean room, making wafers that make computer chips. And then they say, oh do you wear a bunny suit? like they're interested, and when you say yes, then they ask, so where's your...

Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them So many questions for my crystal ball since the Ouija went incommunicado--that librarian with a midget sixth finger, a nub on her southpaw, does she ever nibble it? Can she...

Squeezers.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Squeezers There Is a Tie That Binds Us to Our Homes --BULLDOG SQUEEZERS PLAYING CARDS Do not be angry that we call you brother. Like us, when you push back from the card table and head home to a broad whose voice ...

Eighteen below Zero.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Eighteen below Zero The strays suffer in special ways on frozen mornings like these, when hoarfrost spikes on everything steel: on the barn door handles and stall latches, the tubular paddock gates, even the...

Now the Pasture is Makosk's.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Now the Pasture Is Makosk's After twenty-nine years he wasted suddenly beneath the rough wool of winter coat, hips jutting almost overnight like outriggers, like wings unfurling, expanding as his sides sank, his spine...

Leaving the Land.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Leaving the Land These will be the last purple coneflowers, oxeye daisies and wild black-eyed Susans, the final spiderwort and spurge we shall see in our meadow. The coyotes have already left off singing in the...

Ballad of Three Rivers/Baladilla de los tres rios.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Ballad of Three Rivers for Salvador Quintero The river Guadalquivir winds among orange trees and olive trees. The two rivers of Granada descend from the snow to the wheat. Ay, love, that vanished and never...

Description of the Petenera//Grafico de la Petenera.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Description of the Petenera for Eugenio Montes Bell bass string In the yellow tower, a bell tolls. Upon the yellow wind, the pealing breaks out. In the yellow tower, the...

Road/Camino.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Road A hundred horsemen in funeral attire. Where will they go in the laid-to-rest heavens of the orange grove? Neither Cordoba nor Sevilla is reachable. Nor Granada, which sighs for the sea. Those...

Six Strings/Las Seis Cuerdas.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Six Strings The guitar makes dreams cry. The sobbing of lost souls escapes through its round mouth. And like the tarantula, it spins a huge star, and tracks down the sighs that float in its...

Dance/Danza.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Dance in the garden of the Petenera At night in the garden, six gypsies in white dresses are dancing. At night in the garden, crowned with paper roses and sprigs of jasmine. At night in...

Death of the Petenera/Muerte de la Petenera.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Death of the Petenera In this white house human perdition dies. A hundred ponies are prancing. Their riders are all dead. Beneath the flickering stars of the oil lamps, her silken skirt trembles ...

Flourish/Falseta.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Flourish Ay, gypsy petenera! Yayay petenera! Good little girls did not attend your burial. Girls who offer their locks to the dead Christ, and who wear white scarves in the open markets. Your burial...

De Profundis.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... De Profundis A hundred lovers sleep forever beneath this dry land. Andalucia, long, red-colored roads. Cordoba, green olive trees, where a hundred crosses are placed in their memory. A hundred...

Clamor.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Clamor In the yellow towers, the bells toll. Upon the yellow winds, the pealing breaks out. Death, crowned with withered orange blossoms, travels down a road. She sings and sings a...

Jostling with the actual: my summer with Saul Bellow.
September 22, 2005... I SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1985 in Dusseldorf, West Germany. By day I worked in a high-rise bank, counting out pastel bundles of foreign cash bound first for branches and from there into the hands of German tourists headed to Italy, Turkey, North...

Thanksgiving.(Fictional Work)
September 22, 2005... THERE ARE REASONS I was pitching horseshoes with my father on the last Wednesday in November. My mother was three years dead, and Dad was still nonplussed by the loose ends of his retirement, and my brother Ted, who had a wife and twin...

My Father Hands Out Bibles.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... My Father Hands Out Bibles after breakfasts with his Gideons. We don't talk about it--Bibles, Gideons, Jesus--talk of God between us kept to bless-you good-byes we say like handshakes. He gave me a Gideon once, a...

Key to Pronunciation:/salm/.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Key to Pronunciation:/salm/ Truly, thou unlock the spoken word so that nothing I imagined to say might be restrained from this rough tongue snaking up from my peasant heart. Yea, though I talk through the valley ...

Womanless.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Womanless a headword in Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary for which there is no entry Like God, like Adam at first: dull, until they brought a mirror into the strange arena of the Garden and took...

Bondmaid.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Bondmaid Of the 414,825 words defined in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, bondmaid was the only one lost. Found long after the fascicle Battentlie-Bozzom was published, it appeared in a supplement that came out in...

A Day in the Life.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... A Day in the Life And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. --Genesis 4:15 I put on my overalls and headed out to the thorns with my blade, rolled back my sleeve and swung the scythe ...

After the Storm.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... After the Storm I will go to the bank by the wood... --WALT WHITMAN The sky was drawn with purple clouds. I headed barefoot down to the field in only a robe, untied. The mud oozed up between my toes until...

Necessary Days.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Necessary Days What has been called, is still called, a modern man from a mercantile place-- I am in the forest, in that circumference, a previous nature that has survived and may still, though I...

The Illness, 1960.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The Illness, 1960 O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger, Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye. --JEAN TOOMER July in Alabama, fresh water in a bedpan, a marble-top table, pills and thermometer, ...

Writing a lesson before dying.
September 22, 2005... I WAS TEACHING AT THE University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette when I came up with the idea for A Lesson Before Dying. And that would be around 1983 or 1984, before that school's name was changed to University of Louisiana at...

Forlorn.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Forlorn I don't think there's a sadder word, the way it droops and rhymes saying or, or, which so often leads to looking back forlornly at what might have been, or forward at the murky future...

Patience.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Patience Listen to it say shhh like breakers on the beach. Hear the substance of water and wind leak from your throat between your teeth, your thinning finger up to your lips like a librarian ...

My heart is with you in this sad time.
September 22, 2005... MY SISTER, HELEN, is a fierce believer in the preternatural connection between twins. Twinnergy, she calls it. She's been convinced of this phenomenon for over thirty years, since our first day of school, when we were separated for the first...

The Clown's Mother.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The Clown's Mother She's worried. He's out again in his big shoes, confident as a clear blue sky, radiating bewilderment like the spring sprung. That little pinch of disregard popping its red balloon in him. Every...

Reusable.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Reusable This is for you: a chipped cup bristling with pencils, a bathtub blooming with marigolds by the back yard fence. I can almost hear the long curve of a sigh through that curtain that was once a bed...

Itch, Scratch.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Itch, Scratch after Stephen Dunn From everywhere and all-at-once, from somewhere beneath the moon, came the deep-sea fish that needed to see, came the not-yet-flying squirrel eyeing the too-far limb, came whale ...

Timeline for Lovers.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Timeline for Lovers As if it were linear-- the fall of Tikal and the survival of the Great Wall, our evolution from amoeboid to Sigmund Freud merely The Past, post Magna Carta, MagnaDoodle. As if we...

Panther.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Panther At dawn, just before Audrey wakes the children, pure crystals of snow turn to slush she peeks at through the front door on her way to the basement where the dryer thumps and whirs to a halt when she...

Paintings by Katy Schneider.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... KATY SCHNEIDER Family Portrait with Fan, 2002 oil on panel, 10 in. x 12 in. KATY SCHNEIDER Blue Bowl, 2000 oil on panel, 10 in. x 8 in. KATY SCHNEIDER Self-Portrait, 2002 oil on panel, 6 in. x 9 in. ...

Intimate portraits.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2005... MY WORK CENTERS ON portraiture involving family, pregnancy, and human relationships. These aspects of my immediate world inspire me visually and emotionally, providing the artistic energy to tell the stories of this period in my life: the...

Bone Structure.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Bone Structure The shape of bones beneath the skin, winged clavicle, curve of metatarsal arch, an alabaster span, the fine intrigue of hands, twenty-seven bones, splayed as the sycamore in winter against a...

Thaw.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Thaw Winter was mild this year. Integuments grew fragile with the unexpected weight of sunlight. Unable to bear even meager offerings--the feet of the mallard or one small jewel of a rock-a topographical map of...

Light Speed.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Light Speed Romer expected the sun to emerge from the dark night of eclipse earlier than it appeared. Thus was time measured by the speed of light. One orbit around Jupiter described by numbers ...

Inventions.(Fictional Work)
September 22, 2005... HALFWAY HOME FROM CAMP, Ben's father stops the car in front of a slate blue ranch house. A yard sale. A woman squints at them from behind a card table. It's dishes, a bicycle, ugly paintings, winter coats with orange linings and furry hoods, a...

Water Dogs.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Water Dogs You can live a life without knowing they exist if sky is something glimpsed out windows, clouds are spread scrolls written in a lost language. To find such small, ephemeral rainbows, what is...

Atop Zugspitze.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Atop Zugspitze Sway of the tram swung through my atlas of small bones, at three I came to myself above the summer Alps. A rock face loomed, fell away, and the first cable...

Michaelmas.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Michaelmas Now that wild five-pointed leaves Glut Sagamores gutters Furnace men have come and gone Lowering stair by stair their promise of heat Frost crystals fracture And strangers remark such milky skin ...

We Say the Wind.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... We Say the Wind Hotel balcony. Night city Jewel-cut, light-decked Trees. Ornamental Pond a looking glass struck once, Undulant. What to name Wind's talent for continuously Leaving? Monks raking Gravel,...

What We Make.(Fictional Work)
September 22, 2005... IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. Dugan was taking pictures and he was smoking and the grass against the side of the church was dry as wood shavings. It was a small church, white and peaked, and it sat at the end of a long gravel drive amid tobacco fields...

Blue Tips.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Blue Tips In nature there always seems to be some time to waste. I played with Ohio Blue Tips waiting for the tea to boil. Fire was a surprise. Fire is a surprise. Being so distinct it can only be itself, not earth not...

Transumption.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Transumption But no confusion, no disturbance rude Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime. --KEATS, "How many bards gild the lapses of time!" This happened when I hit the spine of Longinus's On the Sublime into the edge...

Extraction.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Extraction Up on the X-ray screen, my teeth shimmer and smoke, a clutch of milky ghosts diffusing through a film of black, their dug-in roots exposed down to the jaw's bedrock as Doctor Turner talks about John Keats dying...

YMCA, 1971.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... YMCA, 1971 It took a quarter to keep the lights on-- that was all the machines knew. And so my mother emptied her purse for change while my father tried to resuscitate a man on the tennis court in the dark. But the man...

The slump buster.(Short Story)
September 22, 2005... WE DRAGGED OVER BACKSIDES into the clubhouse after losing 3 to 1 to the Tigers. Its awful losing out of town; you don't even want to go to dinner. And we hadn't won in a long time. Coach Ketchum came in and stood in the middle of the locker...

The Whistler and His Dog.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The Whistler and His Dog I steal out to see stars multiply. If I breathe now I'll crack a rock, bring the whole thing down on my head. But I breathe and hold still, watching as children slide past Sirius ...

Canon 501.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Canon 501 The song was moist, filing away, drifting while we drifted, something in blackface, Al Jolson of birdland, not quite right, prophesying until hoarse who knows what. The locals say he draws poison from...

Land of Flint.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Land of Flint Snow slopes away to someone going by. It could be me. There is a whistling like wind on edges, and a hammering, a pause, then hammering again in uneven phrases. Air tilts and shadows ride up....

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread Always a first mother in the story, the witch muttered. Sometimes two, as in this one. Words fell, but her thoughts pushed ahead: one good mother, dead long ago. After the...

Madame Joelle Blot, My French Teacher.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Madame Joelle Blot, My French Teacher You gathered lilacs for me, immoral armloads of lilacs. Shivering, they groaned as they broke. They shed some starry petals on wet ground. We were in Tours, in the Loire valley, in...

Pale Light in the Luxembourg Garden.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... A pale watery light invades the trees as if one were already reading the Book of One's Life.--Afterwards-Was it like that? Was it really like that? I remember holding you in my arms, but the etched intake of breath ...

Caesura 1.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Caesura 1 Come in come in-- on your knees, the stark openings you come-- toppling shoulders, The parable for the corner of your mouth I'm stuck here, If I were doing ...

Caesura 2.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Caesura 2 Toast, applebutter, on the CD player, over the plate, tweak fillip patter but lumbering in relation to the space between, the prophets what flight or forestall? ...

Caesura 3.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Caesura 3 So if the street is stubbed from the toaster, to parting--I anticipate arms flat out. on outstretched things. you erased Did it, easy, with snow, so if the bread yelps ...

Caesura 4.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Caesura 4 Slowly, slowly, wiped away: first then the photo rust-brown easy The words go the timbre of voice of the wing and underneath, roads, kinked the strokes of...

Caesura 5.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Caesura 5 The correct form for form: paper beak and tail. we fold the crane's legs, and then it takes off I think it might be but the feel of folding Don't breathe. paper sheaves. ...

The permanent temporary.(World War II memorial monument)
September 22, 2005... We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible...

Easy to Love.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Easy to Love Bill Malley owned a thrilling baritone but in fact had range for any part of the four, with a fifth thrown in by falsetto, and we were friends, bachelors together. I did all right myself when it came to...

The Prime Mover.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... The Prime Mover Surely even the accidental under-the-table tap of one foot on another, heel nuzzled close to arch, can signal love! Surely even our smallest actions have celestial significance! Deep in the cosmic brain,...

Brown Tree, Yellow Bird.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Brown Tree, Yellow Bird Calculated & proven, any equation can have its name preserved forever in the vast & meaty heavens, the empty quadrants of empty space. So saith the benevolent Abacus, whom we little empty-headed...

Riverside.(Short Story)
September 22, 2005... TEN MILES FROM THE AIRPORT, trapped in summer construction, and the rental car's air-conditioning crapped out. I didn't want to double back to the Avis counter, berate the lady, and trade cars, so I forged ahead. Soon enough it was inner-city...

Atlas of the World.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Atlas of the World Pissed, late, turned around in the dark, I pull into a Gas-N-Go, a neon-bright space where they speak beef jerky, lottery tickets, Mountain Dew, and bait. "Help ya?" The boy's alone, maybe fifteen...

Landfall.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Landfall Some birds, migrating, have fast smooth flights, but some endure storm-black crossings where tearing headwinds arc and tumble them for nights and days above reaching waves, green black hollows, ...

Close Work.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Close Work It's getting on for fall now, coming to the cold I recall, the rented house, plains town; during the weather season, the rafters shifting under the wind-load. The sashes rattled, the blinds sighed, my father...

You Leave One Room, You Enter Another.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... You Leave One Room, You Enter Another Year after year, this: first warm days (March: young shoots--the verdant palette, again) and the two-track side-hilling Buck's Elbow Mountain; it's liturgical. I drive by the church...

Late Autumn Air.(Poem)
September 22, 2005... Late Autumn Air The woods are making music of the wind. It is a simple song played in the old style, based on melodies of dying light and lyrics giving voice to winter's kin. In early darkness you can hear the cold ...