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?