The Midwest Quarterly articles from September 1993

The Midwest Quarterly archives from September 1993

Crow. (poem)
September 22, 1993... When I came to life, I walked straight through the cottage in my pajamas. My bare feet on wood floors woke no one: the man and woman in the geranium bedroom-- power puff and lipstick, black polish of night-time shoes. I walked straight through...

Omega farms. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Your body rests against the lean bones of a tree as I step across the field. Nineteen years old, hungover, you wait for the horses to mate. Above us, the sky blushes steak-red, hangs over the stable like a horse blanket. Why are you here? Your...

Snake pit. (poem)
September 22, 1993... She kneels in the wild grass, mesmerized by the initial softness. How like a childhood memory it seems, stepping down into river weeds, how she plucked a baby turtle from the slime and fingered it like a piece of flint. Now the small thing in...

Walking home. (poem)
September 22, 1993... I want to know what the trees know So I study the torn bark of an oak, series of indentations in a maple leaf, network of veins, as if reading tea-leaves in a cup, and learn that words are tied up with places, the way breath in winter rises and...

Voice on the train out of Grand Central. (poem)
September 22, 1993... I was a coke addict but I'm clean now. I come from an addicted family. My mother was an alcoholic. But when she sobered up I figured I had to. She's 71. I see her on T.V. doing commercials for that rehab out on Montauk--near my house. My...

Latitudes. (poem)
September 22, 1993... If I can love the sparrow falling, if I can love the maggot gnawing, if for better or worse I can love the universe. If when the virus comes and speaks my name I can say |Sir Virus you are obviously not to blame, though I live or die I shall...

Returning to standard time. (poem)
September 22, 1993... we close the windows against October and count backwards on the clock thinking tomorrow we get that hour we let go last spring but we wake in cold dark to hear it scrambling on the roof at dawn it's dancing on the lawn-- the little hour has...

Passion weather. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Sunlight thunders through drawn curtains and the dracena catches chlorophyll while we lay amid the morning. Day breathes shades of mustard in the walnut groves as pale gray quail skirmish over squash seed. From my ceiling roses hang with...

Womb regalia. (poem)
September 22, 1993... This body is festooned with womb regalia; these breasts, two haughty paperweights, belly, a raucous tavern of spirit waters, capers vet unsung. And this one, the waiting one, relearns the alphabet of bone and blood in an unlit sea. Still, you...

August by the willow. (poem)
September 22, 1993... It was a day when all out-of-the-way things Became suddenly obvious, when the sun, With each new viewing, took on a new shade. It was a day or an hour, a measure of light's Equilibrium, illumining wildflowers Blown in the field. Reconciling our...

History. (poem)
September 22, 1993... What is here, from echo to echo, Of silence's ritual, Where wind leans against no object And light is identical? I watch from a great height As clouds lift other clouds. What they bring to the moment Of their history lasts longer than sound....

Last week in the cottage. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Weather tires as the brilliance of forests converges. The lawn grows little each week. Windchimes ignite over candle-end weeds. Shadows send and receive one another in the blazes of hollowed space. Scarlet falls and returns like rain and the...

Resurrection. (poem)
September 22, 1993... Grandfather's crabapple tree, Covered with a cotton sheet Of snow, looks Brittle now with winter. In spring The branches will bend With pink blossom, Fragrant as his face After a shave. Awakened By the thaw, He will roll over, Throw back his...

War song. (poem)
September 22, 1993... There is a song In the desert. it is a wet song, One the small boat Would rock to, if it could. The song of the flute, so much breath Behind it. Beneath the din, There are children humming From all directions. Listen. Even now it grows softer....

Mine. (poem)
September 22, 1993... You are with me this moment, now, again when giddy heron eddy and stall, when swans glide a glassy pond, when a white gull opens another page of sky, when among the busy silences of adolescent pines the breast is opal, swathed in red flannel,...

Can philosophers cooperate intellectually? Metaphysics as applied mathematics.
September 22, 1993... Do not walk behind me, I may not lead; do not walk before me, I may not follow; walk beside me, and we shall be friends, --Hymn in Unitarian-Universalist Churches Philosophy is not, or ought not to be, a furious...

Hobnobbing with Euclid.
September 22, 1993... LIKE THE SUBTLE RHYTHMS and harmonies all-pervasive in the Cosmos, or, if you will, like the omnipresent secret signs of the hand of God for him--or her--who has eyes to see, mathematics is all about us, teasing us with its mysteries. Yet...

Masks and masquerade: the iconography of Harlem Renaissance.
September 22, 1993... IN SOME PLACES the autumn of 1924 may have been lan unremarkable season. In Harlem, it was like a foretaste of paradise. "A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on broad avenues" (Lewis, Vogue, 103). Arna...

Spike Lee: protest, literary tradition, and the individual filmmaker.
September 22, 1993... SANFORD PINSKER The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be...

'Psychological accidents': 'In Cold Blood' and ritual sacrifice.
September 22, 1993... American prison literature of the past twenty-five years has been preoccupied with a contradiction that is central to the national consciousness. Throughout this period, imprisonment and execution have often risen to the level of obsession;...

George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance": the first literary portrait of a woman addict and her recovery.
September 22, 1993... THE EARLIEST literary alcoholic portrait is perhaps Jonah in the Bible; morality plays always featured him as a roaring drunk. The first full portrait of a male alcoholic is probably Chaucer's Pardoner, or perhaps his Harry Bailey. Chaucer...

Ring Lardner and the Other.
September 22, 1993... By Douglas Robinson, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 324 pages. $45.00. As an undergraduate I remember a paper written and circulated by some self-amused sophomore English major in which he analyzed with historical, literary,...

The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne.
September 22, 1993... Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn. The Library of Living Philosophers, volume XX. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1991. 785 pp., paper $24.95, cloth $49.95. The Library of Living Philosophers allows great philosophers to respond to questions...