The Midwest Quarterly articles from January 2001

The Midwest Quarterly archives from January 2001

Leonardo Da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, and Fear of Flying
January 1, 2001... IN 1904 LONDON'S theater-going crowd thrilled to the performance of Scottish novelist and playwright James Barrie's delightful musical, Peter Pan Or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Initially presented on December 27, 1904, it was published as the...

Doom, Providence, Accident: An Essay
January 1, 2001... I'VE BEEN THINKING lately about the catacombs. I can nearly imagine them... and the Romans dancing overhead. The subterranean Christians hardly listened, though, to the debauched pagan footsteps. Yet they were ever so grateful for the sound of...

IN THE WOODS.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... baloian Your delicate wingmarks tell how days are made, until the last one vanishes into the shadowy weather. Your hair embroiders the wind with kind words and yesterday's promises hang by a thread...

RUSH HOUR IN THE CITY OF Q.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... It is early morning or late afternoon. Time's frozen like a single frame of film. Each face is different. No two show the same emotion or share the same glare. One is thinking about his first night of love. ...

LATE AFTERNOON AFTER REVERDY.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Each footstep breaks off a piece of the day. Rows of sad but decent people trudge past a story long as the boulevard. As they pass my window, a thinning line of dark, I hear the absence of whispers. Another wave...

THE MAGIC DEER.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Out on a stretch of old road, tracks are scratched faintly in the earth. Whole years pass by there unnoticed in the rain. In this night, I follow the sun far down into the earth,...

UNDRESSING A COP.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Do it first in your mind. Many times. Linger over details. Eye each piece of shiny metal, thick black leather, muscled bicep. Take control when you start. Your sure fingers will unhook the square, silver...

A WORLD ELSEWHERE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Somewhere there's a simple life To settle into. All around you, leaves Cling to a field Whose sheaf of weeds stands transparent; And late at night, Strangers confer in a kitchen On how to live ceremoniously,...

THE WORLD IS MOSTLY SKY.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... It's our life's work, what's close: the daily touching, the density. But the soul has a hunger for seeing. It loves the long vantage, and looks out quietly over an airy world of distance. Nothing is ever solved...

HONEYMOONERS.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... --for M. The Alberta Clipper predicted last night barrels into town. And so, like everyone else, we hurry to the market at dusk, readying for the record-making storm, another weekend of train whistles fracturing the snow...

LATE WINTER: SURVIVAL.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... First, attempt to describe the blackbirds, the plentiful anonymous mass in the top of the cottonwood. Begin with "black," "copious" and "red-winged," knowing that anything specific will point only to more uncertainty. ...

THE MESSENGER.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The man at the door is a stranger. He'll sit a long time by the stove eating blueberry pie and drinking wine before he'll even tell her that he has a message. It may take years for him to deliver it. Sometimes...

POWER FAILURE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... A thousand years of civilization goes out with the lights. The way out of the basement to the upper world, to the worn book of matches and kitchen candles, the usual path, now made narrow by interwoven...

MARRIAGE AT BAIKAL.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "Man does not have enough feelings to respond to this wonder." Valentin Rasputin In Siberia, even on the bleakest winter days, brides and grooms pose for their portraits before Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest...

AT THE LAKE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... "Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves." Nagarjuna (first etude) In the moment when the sun slips almost embarrassed behind the lowest bank of cirrus clouds, ...

THIS HOUSE.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... So this is how I enter: I walk the astroturf that stretches down the walkaway my brother laid after shop class. The leafing maple in the afternoon breeze shakes over a twisted hump of roots like loosened braids of...

DIFFUSED LIGHT.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The kitchen lives only in late afternoons when she stands at the sink before the window. The sun is not so bright, not so hot, when it rests upon the orchids suspended there. Only a moderate light do die blinds allow in....

APRIL.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I am going to breathe as the uncelebrated starling defending its worm breathes in the garden where yellow-green leaves turn to the sun and the grass holds shadows of branches. I will...

PROVERBS OF THE CHAMELEON.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... From the O.E.D. A chameleon is a creature the bigness of an ordinary lizard his tongue of a marvelous length in respect of his body The chameleon who is said to feed upon nothing but air hath of all animals the...

THE RAIN MAKES GHOSTS OF US ALL.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The gray sky and the sun cold as a coin remind her why she likes this town in winter, remind her that cold cannot be hurried, but also that it cannot last forever. The road has thawed and frozen, thawed and refrozen. ...

STANDING IN AFTERNOON.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Sometimes I find you adrift in your mother's chair, strands of sun straying across your face. Something in me does not fear the waves of breath that ease you out beyond tides of longing or remorse....

HIS KIND.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... He leaves tracks in the desert. He must be a god. He meets my kin, a heap of bones. Which way to heaven? Dunes dumbfound him. They'd shrug if they could. Flatlanders all, they've never liked up. ...

Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
January 1, 2001... MOST CRITICAL DISCUSSION of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" seems inevitably to revolve around the attendant characters of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones. This is hardly surprising, considering that each may be viewed as the...

Thinking the Unthinkable: Reopening Conan Doyle's "Cardboard Box"
January 1, 2001... BETWEEN JULY 1891 and June 1892, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published twelve Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine. In October 1892 they were gathered together and published as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. These stories proved so...

Sending an Irishman "Realing": Constructive Realism and George Berkeley's Philosophy of Arithmetic
January 1, 2001... I RECENTLY HAD the opportunity to reread George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), published in the same year he was ordained an Anglican priest. You may remember Berkeley: he's the 18th-century British...

Aborigine Spirituality as the Grounding Theme in the Films of Peter Weir
January 1, 2001... IT SEEMS THAT MOST Americans know and appreciate Peter Weir's Hollywood works, films such as Dead Poets Society (DP, 1989), Fearless (1993), and the recent The Truman Show. Few among Weir's American audiences, however, know of his early...

Incidents in the Life and Death of Jules Lequyer.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Jules Lequyer's Abel and Abel Followed by "Incidents in the Life and Death of Jules Lequyer. "Translation by Mark West, Biography by Donald Wayne Viney. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, xviii + 200pp. Cloth, $89.95. This...