by Paul Celan
"For the last
time psycho-
logy."
The imitation
jackdaw
breakfasts.
The glottal stop
sings.
DETOUR-
MAPS, phosphorous,
far behind Here by sheer
ring-fingers beaten.
Travelluck, look:
The tripdart, two
inches from the target,
topples
into the aorta.
The shared goods, ten
hundredweight
folie a deux,
wake up
in the vultureshadow,
in the seventeenth liver, at the foot
of the stuttering
information mast.
Before it,
in the slated watershield, the
three standing whales
head the ball.
A right eye
flashes.
SPASMS. I love you, psalms,
the feeling-walls deep in the you-ravine
rejoice, seedpainted one,
Eternal, de-eternalized are you
eternalized, Uneternal, you,
hey,
into you, into you
I sing the bone-rod-scratch,
Redred, far behind the pubic hair
harped, in the caves,
outside, all around
the unending none-whatsoever-canon,
you throw me the nine times
twined, dripping
eyetooth-wreath.
PAU, LATER
In the corner of
your eyes, stranger,
the albigenses-shadow -
after
the Waterloo-Plein,
towards the orphaned
raffia shoe, towards
the also bartered Amen,
into the eternal
housegap I
sing you:
so that Baruch, he who never
weeps,
may grind aright
all around you the
angular,
ununderstood, seeing
tear.
THE STALLION with the flowering wick,
levitating, at pass-
height,
comet brilliance on
the rump.
You, in the con-
spirationary torrents un-
locked, the
bouncing breasts in the sharp
verse-fibula-yoke,
fall with me through
images, rocks, numbers.
LYON, LES ARCHERS
The iron spike, reared,
in the brickniche:
the co-millennium,
instranges itself, unconquerable,
follows
your driving eyes,
now,
with glances cast here by dice
you wake, who is beside you,
she becomes heavier,
heavier,
you too, with all
the instrangedness in you,
instrange yourself,
deeper,
the One
string
tenses its pain between you,
the missing target
radiates, bow.
THE INDUSTRIOUS
mineral resources, homey,
the heated syncope,
the not-to-be-deciphered
jubilee,
the completely glassed in
spider-altars in the all-
overtowering low building,
the intermediate sounds
(even yet?)
the shadowpalavers,
the anxieties, icetrue,
flightclear,
the baroquely cloaked,
language-swallowing showerroom,
semantically floodlit,
the uninscribed wall
of a standing-cell:
here
live yourself
straightthrough, without clock.
WHEN I DON'T KNOW, DON'T KNOW,
without you, without you, without a You,
they all come,
the
freebeheaded, who
lifelong brainlessly sang
of the tribe
of the You-less:
Aschrej,
a word without meaning,
transtibetan,
injected into the
Jewess
Pallas
Athena's
helmeted ovaries,
and when he,
he,
fetally,
harps Carpathian notnot,
then the Allemande
bobbins her lace for
the vomiting im-
mortal
song.
YOU WERE my death:
you I could hold,
when all fell from me.
LINE THE WORDCAVES
with panther skins,
widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,
sense-hither and sense-thither,
give them courtyards, chambers, trapdoors
and wildnesses, parietal,
and listen for their second
and each time second and second
tone.
NEAR. IN THE AORTIC ARCH.
in the light-blood:
the light-word.
Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
Carried over:
all the weepings.
Quiet, in the coronary arteries,
unconstricted:
Ziv, that light.
IMAGINE
Imagine:
the moorsoldier from Masada
teaches himself homeland, in
the most inextinguishable way,
against
all barbs in the wire.
Imagine:
the eyeless without shape
lead you free through the throng, you
grow stronger and
stronger.
Imagine: your
own hand
has held once
more this
into life re-
suffered
piece of
inhabitable earth.
Imagine:
that came towards me,
awake to the name, awake to the hand,
forever,
from what cannot be buried.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
FROM LICHTZWANG/ LIGHTDURESS
SOUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS, On
ward onethousandandone,
daynightly
the Bear-Polka:
they retrain you,
you again become
he.
WE ALREADY LAY
deep in the underbrush, when you
finally crept along.
But we could not
darken over towards you:
there reigned
lightduress.
CONTACT MINES on your left
moons, Saturn.
Shardsealed
the orbits out there.
Now must be the moment
for a just
birth.
CLEARED, this start
also.
Bow-wheelchant with
Corona.
The duskrudder responds,
your torn-
awake vein
unknots itself,
what's left of you, slants,
you gain
altitude.
ONCE, death was much in demand,
you hid in me.
TWO AT BRANCUSI'S
If one among these stones
were to tell
what conceals it:
here, nearby,
on the old man's crutch-stick,
it would open, as a wound,
into which you'd have to dive,
lonely,
far from my scream, the already also
; hewn, white one.
TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,
in the
Hiitte,
written in the book
— whose name did it record
before mine—?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart,
forest turf, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,
crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,
he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,
the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.
TO A BROTHER IN ASIA
The auto-transfigured
cannons
drive toward heaven,
ten
bombers yawn,
a running fire blooms,
as surely as peace,
a handful of rice
expires as your friend.
ORANIENSTRASSE 1
Tin grew in my hand
I didn't know how
to help myself.
I didn't want to mould,
it didn't want to read me —
If now
Ossietzky's last
drinking bowl
could be found,
I'd let the tin
learn from it,
and the host of pilgrims'
staffs
would ensilence, endure the hours.
STREW OCHER into my eyes:
you no longer
live there,
save
on the tomb-
furnishings, save,
pace off the stonerows,
on your hands,
with their dream
paint over the
stamped out
temporal bone's squama,
at the
great
bifurcation re-
count yourself to the ocher,
three times, nine times.
LEAP CENTURIES, leap
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stocked in honeycomb-troughs,
bits
on chips,
the menorah-poem from Berlin,
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
cared for, a
-live?),
reading station in the late-word,
economical ignition points
in the sky,
crests under fire,
feelings, frost-
spindled,
cold start —
with hemoglobin.
TREK-SCOW-TIME.
the half-transformed drag
at one of the worlds,
the dis-elevated one, intimated,
speaks under the foreheads on the bank:
Quits with death, quits with
God.
YOU BE LIKE YOU. always.
Stant up Jherosalem inde
erheyff dich
Even he who cut the bond with you,
inde wirt
erluchtet
knots it anew, in the Gehugnis,
mudclots I swallowed, in the tower,
language, dark pilaster strip,
kumi
ori.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
FROM SCHNEEPART/ SNOWPART
UNWASHED, UNPAINTED,
in Hereafter's
pithead:
there
where we find ourselves,
Earthy, always,
a
belated
bucket conveyor pierces
us cloudtorn,
upwards, downwards,
seditious
piping inside, on Fool's
legs,
the flightshadow in
the iridescing round
heals us in, into the seven-
height,
ice-age-close
the felt swan pair steers
through the hovering
stone-icon
YOU LIE in the great listening
ambushed, snowed in.
Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Sweden —
Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Eden —
The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the saw,
for herself, for none, for everyone —
The Landwehrkanal will not roar
Nothing
stops.
LILAC AIR with yellow windowstains,
Orion's belt above the
Anhalter ruin,
Flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,
from
standing bar to
snow bar.
WELL-GRAVES in the wind:
someone will play the viola, day downward, in the ale house,
someone will stand on his head in the word Enough,
someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch.
This year
does not roar across,
it throws back December, November,
it turns up its wounds,
it opens up to you, young
grave-
well,
twelvemouth.
THE BREACHED YEAR
with the moldering edges
of delusion bread.
Drink
from my mouth.
UNREADABILITY of this
world. All doubles.
The strong clocks
back the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
WHORISH ELSE. And eternity
blood-black circumbabeled.
Moored
by your loamy locks
my faith.
Two fingers, far from the hand,
a-row the swampy
oath.
WHAT NEWS
at this voice? What
does this
voice
sew
hither, beyond?
The chasms are
sworn in on White, from them
arose
the snowneedle,
swallow it,
you order the world,
that counts
as much as nine names,
named on knees,
tumuli, tumuli,
you hill away, alive,
come
into the kiss,
a flip of the fin,
steady,
lights up the bays,