Formulas For Oblivion by Mark Strand

Formulas For Oblivion

1.  Casting the first stone after which the hands cast

 themselves and the arms and so on until you feel

you have cast yourself after the first stone

into oblivion.

2.  Eating your own words by which you will grow thin,

depleted, finally, of even a mouth to care for

the orphaned tongue or the tired foot.

3.  Turning yourself inside out so the features you are

known by become obvious secrets and the hidden

parts of yourself become a mask of honesty.

Thus you will never know who you are; oblivion

has begun to tell you who you are

4.  Lending the helping hand and keeping the other one

to yourself. The helping hand will feed your

friend, the other one will feel abandoned.

What happens is clear: you lose your friend

and die alone, a victim of the helping hand’s

selfish refusal to aid the other one.

5.  Cutting off your nose to spite your face. For the

beauty of absence is catching and the face will

want to spite the nose by having it back and then

will beg to be cut off from it. This will go on.

6.  Taking everything to heart and allowing yourself no

rest but what is impossible to take, which is

oblivion.

7.  Killing the thing you love and spending each night

with its ghost. Forcing your passion into an

absence is a common approach to oblivion.

8.  Sticking your head in the lion’s mouth and seeing

the remnants of your past: the tongue of your

father, the teeth of your mother, your own head

grinning back.

9.  Saving the best for last while consuming the worst

at the start. For the worst tastes better when

you know the best is to come. Doubts will arise.

After a while you may not believe the best will

be last and oblivion will take you for better

or worse.

10.  Giving yourself the benefit of the doubt which is the

surest and truest formula for oblivion.

A Curse Against Elegies by Anne Sexton

A Curse Against Elegies

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?

I am tired of all your pious talk.

Also, I am tired of all the dead.

They refuse to listen,

so leave them alone.

Take your foot out of the graveyard,

they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:

the last empty fifth of booze,

the rusty nails and chicken feathers

that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,

the worms that lived under the cat's ear

and the thin-lipped preacher

who refused to call

except once on a flea-ridden day

when he came scuffing in through the yard

looking for a scapegoat.

I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.

And the dead are bored with the whole thing.

But you - you go ahead,

go on, go on back down

into the graveyard,

lie down where you think their faces are;

talk back to your old bad dreams.

The First Supper by Franz Wright

The First Supper

Death, heaven, bread, breath and the sea

here

to scare me

But I too will be fed by

the other food

that I know nothing

of, the breath

the death

the sea of

  it

Day

when the almond does not

blossom and the grasshopper drags itself along

But if You can make a star from nothing You can raise me up

A Fable by Louise Glück

A Fable

Two women with

the same claim

came to the feet of

the wise king. Two women,

but only one baby.

The king knew

someone was lying.

What he said was

Let the child be

cut in half; that way

no one will go

empty-handed. He

drew his sword.

Then, of the two

women, one

renounced her share:

this was

the sign, the lesson.

Suppose

you saw your mother

torn between two daughters:

what could you do

to save her but be

willing to destroy

yourself—she would know

who was the rightful child,

the one who couldn’t bear

to divide the mother.

Icelandic Hurricane by Tomas Tranströmer

Icelandic Hurricane

No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is, all that I suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door.  And now inside.  Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being stricken. . . Outside a horde of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait.

(Translated by Göran Malmqvist) 

The People of the Other Village by Thomas Lux

The People of the Other Village

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

The Bear by Galway Kinnell

The Bear

1

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2

I take a wolf’s rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3

On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

4

On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

5

And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

6

Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

7

I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

Let Me Begin Again by Philip Levine

Let Me Begin Again

 

Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly and changes nothing. Let
me go back to land after a lifetime
of going nowhere. This time lodged
in the feathers of some scavenging gull
white above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of
your harbor. This leaking freighter
has brought a hold full of hayforks
from Spain, great jeroboams of dark
Algerian wine, and quill pens that can’t
write English. The sailors have stumbled
off toward the bars of the bright houses.
The captain closes his log and falls asleep.
1/10’28. Tonight I shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

 

Again and Again and Again by Anne Sexton

Again and Again and Again

You said the anger would come back 

just as the love did. 

I have a black look I do not 

like. It is a mask I try on. 

I migrate toward it and its frog 

sits on my lips and defecates. 

It is old. It is also a pauper. 

I have tried to keep it on a diet. 

I give it no unction. 

There is a good look that I wear 

like a blood clot. I have 

sewn it over my left breast. 

I have made a vocation of it. 

Lust has taken plant in it 

and I have placed you and your 

child at its milk tip. 

Oh the blackness is murderous 

and the milk tip is brimming 

and each machine is working 

and I will kiss you when 

I cut up one dozen new men 

and you will die somewhat, 

again and again. 

  

The History of One Tough Motherfucker by Charles Bukowski

The History of One Tough Motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…"
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
"you can make it," I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!"
but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?"
"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!"
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows…
it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it's bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

 

Matins by Louise Glück

Matins

You want to know how I spend my time?

I walk the front lawn, pretending

to be weeding. You ought to know

I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling

clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact

I'm looking for courage, for some evidence

my life will change, though

it takes forever, checking

each clump for the symbolic

leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already

the leaves turning, always the sick trees

going first, the dying turning

brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform

their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?

As empty now as at the first note.

Or was the point always

to continue without a sign?

Bitterness by Philip Levine

Bitterness

Here in February, the fine
dark branches of the almond
begin to sprout tiny clusters
of leaves, sticky to the touch.
Not far off, about the length
of my morning shadow, the grass
is littered with the petals
of the plum that less than
a week ago blazed, a living
candle in the hand of earth.
I was living far off two years
ago, fifteen floors above
119th Street when I heard
a love of my young manhood
had died mysteriously in
a public ward. I did not
go out into the streets to
walk among the cold, sullen
poor of Harlem, I did not
turn toward the filthy window
to question a distant pale sky.
I did not do anything.
The grass is coming back, some
patches already bright, though
at this hour still silvered
with dew. By noon I can stand
sweating in the free air, spading
the difficult clay for the bare
roots of a pear or apple that
will give flower and fruit longer
than I care to think about.

Quartz Clock by Jane Hirshfield

Quartz Clock

The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
The ideas of poems turn into only themselves,
as the hands of the clock do,
or the face of a person.
It changes, but only more into the person.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Love After Love 

The time will come 

when, with elation 

you will greet yourself arriving 

at your own door, in your own mirror 

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. 

You will love again the stranger who was your self. 

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored 

for another, who knows you by heart. 

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, 

peel your own image from the mirror. 

Sit. Feast on your life.

Love Poem by Louise Glück

Love Poem

There is always something to be made of pain.

Your mother knits.

She turns out scarves in every shade of red.

They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm

while she married over and over, taking you

along. How could it work,

when all those years she stored her widowed heart

as though the dead come back.

No wonder you are the way you are,

afraid of blood, your women

like one brick wall after another.

Livy’s Metamorphoses by Zbigniew Herbert

Livy’s Metamorphoses

How did my grandfather and his father understand Livy

for they surely read him at their classical gymnasium

in the somewhat unpropitious time of year

when a chestnut tree stands at the window—ardent candelabras of

  blossoms—

and all my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s thoughts ran panting to

  Mizia

singing in the garden showing her décolleté and goddess-like legs to the

  knee

or Gabi from the Vienna Opera with her cherub’s locks

Gabi with her snub nose and Mozart in her throat

or finally to good old Józia a refuge for the forlorn

she without beauty talent or extravagant demands

and so they read Livy—O season of budding flowers—

in the smell of chalk boredom naphthalene floor wash

under a portrait of the emperor

for there was an emperor then

and the empire like all empires

seemed eternal

Reading the City’s history they succumbed to the delusion

that they were the Romans or the decendants of Romans

those sons of the vanquished themselves under the yoke

it’s likely the Latin teacher had a part in it

with his position of counselor to the court

a collection of ancient virtues under a scruffy frock coat

following Livy he instilled in his pupils scorn for the mob

so popular revolt—res tam foeda—aroused their loathing

while on the other hand all the conquests seemed just

showing simply the victory of the superior stronger

they were pained by the defeat at Lake Trasimeno

while Scipio’s ascendancy filled them with pride

“they took Hannibal’s death with unfeigned relief

easily far too easily they let themselves be led

through entrenchments of dependent clauses

convoluted constructions ruled by the gerund

swollen rivers of elocution

syntactical booby traps

—into battle

for a cause not theirs

Not until my father and I after him did anyone

read Livy against Livy

studying closely what lies under the fresco

that’s why Scaevola’s theatrical gesture did not reverberate in us

nor did centurions’ cries or triumphal marches

and we tended to feel moved by the ruination

of the Samnites Gauls or Etruscans

we counted the many names of peoples the Romans trampled to dust

those buried without praise those who for Livy

were not worth even a ripple of style

those Hirpins Apuleans Lucanians Osunans

and residents of Tarentum Metapontis Locri

My father knew well and I know too

that one day on the farthest outskirts

without any signs from the heavens

in Pannonia Sarajevo or Trebizond

in a city on the cold sea

or in the valley of Panshir

a local fire will break out

and the empire will fall

Notorious by Cathy Park Hong

Notorious

  

Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum?

You in heaven, na, be happy.

You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink

snuggly over your Bluto belly,

& this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji.

Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns,

you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die,

now faput. Dead. Why so chee?

Ayaya, you in heaven for white people.

Wrong ear-sucking heaven.

Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit,

you smell wet dog?

Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble:

“No Hennessy just seltzer, please,”

before they sing your hits a capella.

Shataa, Baagad Bullya,

very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi.

Silly as a cricket in pubes.

Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar.

A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun

and swatting away chweetie pie cupids,

looms Fatmouth God,

frowning like rotten turbot.

But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens,

so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky

melts to Op Art swirls

of Cherry Coke red, burning upup

white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt

& black cell phone towers.

This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh

& video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis.

But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis?

Where is 2Packi?

Desire by Langston Hughes

Desire

Desire to us

Was like a double death,

Swift dying

Of our mingled breath,

Evaporation

Of an unknown strange perfume

Between us quickly

In a naked

Room.

My Night With Jeffrey Dahmer by Mark Wunderlich

My Night With Jeffrey Dahmer

—like any night spent out in a bar—this one

doused in the pall of neon, 1989, Formica,

brushed metal and the spin of sound in the club,

while downstairs in a darker bar, where the older men

enjoyed each other's company and where I had gone

to cool off, a man stood next to me

and knocked my beer to the floor, so sorry—he was

very sorry—hand on my arm as I bent to pick up

the bottle, one hand on my arm, the other signaling

to the bartender, holding up a finger then pointing

to the empty I proffered, put on the wood counter,

bottle which the keep swept away, replaced,

a cold, green glass already sweating a bit, beading

in the heat of the basement.

He was a stranger, older than I was by a decade or more,

blond and mustached, big glasses—some farmer's son—

a bit out-of-date, stuck as he was in the country,

a man driven in to the capital to spend a night

among others of his kind, away from his mother's kitchen,

the chilled hum of the bulk tank, and the cows

whose needs were at the center of a life spent in their service—

but no, he was from Milwaukee, he said, though to me

his words were unimportant—so sorry, let me, I'll get you

a new one, let me buy you one,

and so he took out his wallet and handed over his dollars,

and I suppose I looked to see

if he had left a tip since I always look for this,

having done already the work of service

in which you depend on the manners and guilt

and sense of custom of those you attend, their

generosity, their goodness, their notion

of what is normal and right, what to offer to others

in exchange for their help, their attentiveness, here

let me buy you a beer, so sorry for my clumsiness,

let me put this hand on your arm, do you live here,

are you at the university, do you like the music,

did I tell you my name?—his questions the questions

of any curious man talking to a farmer's son

in a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, asking my name which I withheld,

my name which I keep lodged between my teeth,

under my tongue, in the pocket of my clavicle,

in the scar on my eyebrow, in my belly,

in the sack of my scrotum, in my head, my hand, my arm

which he touched lightly, my mouth, my teeth, my tongue

which began to move, unlock, give up its wariness, give in

to say my name is Mark. What's yours?

The Night Shed Its Blue Tears by Stefán Hörður Grímsson

The Night Shed Its Blue Tears

The night shed its blue tears

on grass and woods

and the earth grew cool and deep

beneath my feet

and I felt for a moment

as if a pallor struck my breast

and my bones were rotting

and I was seized by fear.

Then I thought I heard a low whisper like that of a closing flower:

You are a spring a thousand years ago.

Ars Poetica? by Czesław Miłosz

Ars Poetica?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form   

that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose   

and would let us understand each other without exposing   

the author or reader to sublime agonies.   

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:   

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,   

so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out   

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.   

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,   

though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.   

It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,   

when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.   

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,   

who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,   

and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,   

work at changing his destiny for their convenience?   

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today,   

and so you may think that I am only joking   

or that I’ve devised just one more means   

of praising Art with the help of irony.   

There was a time when only wise books were read,   

helping us to bear our pain and misery.   

This, after all, is not quite the same   

as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.   

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be   

and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

People therefore preserve silent integrity,   

thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.   

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,   

as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,   

under unbearable duress and only with the hope   

that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

(Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee)

Sight by W. S. Merwin

Sight 

Once 

a single cell 

found that it was full of light 

and for the first time there was seeing 

when 

I was a bird 

I could see where the stars had turned 

and I set out on my journey 

high 

in the head of a mountain goat 

I could see across a valley 

under the shining trees something moving 

deep 

in the green sea 

I saw two sides of the water 

and swam between them 

I 

look at you 

in the first light of the morning 

for as long as I can