by Paul Celan
where you, mired, test the wind.
* * *
HARBOR
Sorehealed: where—,
when you were like me, criss-
and crossdreamt by
schnappsbottlenecks at the
whore table
—cast
my happiness aright, Seahair,
heap up the wave, that carries me, Blackcurse,
break your way
through the hottest womb,
Icesorrowpen—,
where-
to
didn’t you come to lie with me, even
on the benches
at Mother Clausen’s, yes, she
knows, how often I sang all
the way up into your throat, hey-diddle-doo,
like the bilberryblue
alder of homeland with all its leaves,
hey-doodle-dee,
you, like the
astral-flute from
beyond the worldridge—there too
we swam, nakednudes, swam,
the abyssverse on
the fire-red forehead—unconsumed by
fire the deep-
inside flooding gold
dug its paths upward—,
here,
with eyelashed sails,
remembrance too drove past, slowly
the conflagration jumped over, cut
off, you,
cut off on
the two blue-
black memory-
barges,
but driven on now also
by the thousand-
arm, with which I held you,
they cruise, past starthrow-dives,
our still drunk, still drinking
byworldly mouths—I name only them—,
till over there at the timegreen clocktower
the net-, the numberskin soundlessly
peels off—a delusion-dock,
swimming, before it,
off-world-white the
letters of the
tower cranes write
an unname, along which
she clambers up, to the deathjump, the
cat, the trolley, life,
which the sense-
greedy sentences dredge up, after midnight,
at which
neptunic sin throws its corn-
schnapps-colored towrope,
between
twelve-
toned lovesoundbuoys
—draw well winch back then, with you
it sings in the no-longer-
inland choir—
the beaconlightships come dancing,
from afar, from Odessa,
the loadline,
which sinks with us, true to our burden,
owlglasses all this
downward, upward, and why not? sorehealed, where—,
when—
hither and past and hither.
* * *
III
BLACK,
like the memory-wound,
the eyes dig toward you
in the by heart-teeth light-
bitten crownland,
that remains our bed:
through this shaft you have to come—
you come.
In seed-
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, forever.
The namegiving has an end,
over you I cast my lot.
* * *
ANVILHEADEDNESS, at
palfrey pace,
alongside us, of the double
slowly streaming redtrack.
Silvery:
Hoofsayings, lullaby-
neighing—dream-
hurdle and -weir—: no one
shall go farther, nothing.
You under me, centaurishly
rearing,
I empty into our across-
roaring shadow.
* * *
LANDSCAPE with urnbeings.
Conversations
from smokemouth to smokemouth.
They eat:
the bedlamite’s truffle, a piece
unburied poetry,
found tongue and tooth.
A tear rolls back into its eye.
The left, orphaned
half of the pilgrim-
mussel—they gave it to you,
then they bound you—
listening it illuminates the space:
the clinker game against death
can begin.
* * *
THE JUGGLERDRUM,
from my heartpenny loud.
The rungs of the ladder, up
which Ulysses, my monkey, clambers toward Ithaca,
rue de Longchamp, one hour
after the spilled wine:
add that to the image,
which casts us home into
the dice-cup, where I lie by you,
unplayable.
* * *
WHEN YOU LIE
in the bed of missing bunting,
by blueblack syllables, in
the shadow of snowlashes,
through thought-showers the steely
crane comes swimming—
you open yourself to him.
His bill ticks you the hour
into each mouth—in each
chimes, with bloodred bell-rope, a silence-
millennium,
the hour and the reprieve
coin each other to death,
the taler, the groschen
rain hard through your pores
in
the shape of a second
you fly there and barricade
the doors Yesterday and Tomorrow,—phosphorous
like eternity-teeth,
buds your one, then your other
breast,
toward the grips, under
the strokes—: so tightly,
so deeply
sown
is the starry
crane-
seed.
* * *
BEHIND COALMARKED sleep
—our cottage is known—
where our dreamcrest swelled, fiery, despite all,
and I drove the goldnails into our
coffin-beautiful morning
swimming alongside,
there the rods dipped royally before our eye,
water came, water,
savagely
the skiffs bit through the grand-second memory,
the mud-muzzled beasts drifted around us
—that much
no heaven caught yet—,
what a weir, torn one,
you were, once again!—, the beasts, the beasts, adrift,
salthorizons
were building on our glances, a mountain grew
far outward into the ravine,
where my world summoned
yours, forever.
* * *
IN PRAGUE
Half-death,
suckled on our life,
lay ash-image-true around us—
we too
kept on drinking, soul-crossed, two swords,
stitched to heavenstones, born of wordblood,
in the nightbed,
larger and larger
we grew, intergrafted, there was
no name left for
what urged us on (one of thirty-
and-how-many
was my living shadow,
who climbed up the delusion-stairs to you?),
a tower,
the half-one built into the Whither,
a Hradčany
all of goldmaker’s No,
bone-Hebrew,
ground to sperm,
ran through the hourglass,
through which we swam, two dreams now, tolling
against time, on the squares.
* * *
STARTING FROM THE ORCHIS—
go, count
the shadows of the steps up to it
behind the five-mountain childhood—,
from it, I win
the half-word for twelfth-night, from it
comes my hand to grab you
forever.
A little doom, as big
as the heartdot I set
behind your my name
stammering eye,
is helpful to me.
You also come,
as if over meadows,
and bring along the image of a quaywall,
there—when
our keys, deep in the refused,
crossed each other heraldically—
strangers play dice with what
we both still own
of language,
of destiny.
* * *
HALFGNAWED, mask-
miened corbel stone,
deep
in the eyeslit-crypt:
Inward, upward
into skull’s inside,
where you break up heaven, again and again,
into furrow and convolution
he plants his image,
which outgrows, outgrows itself.
* * *
FROM FISTS, white
from the truth hammered
free of the wordwall,
a new brain blooms for you.
Beautiful, to be veiled by nothing,
it casts them, the
thoughtshadows.
Therein, immovable,
fold up, even today,
twelve mountains, twelve foreheads.
Vagabond Melancholy, also star-
eyed by way of you,
hears of it.
* * *
BULLROARERS whizz into the light, truth
sends word.
Yonder, the shore’s
slope swells toward us,
a dark
thousand-brightness—the
ressurected houses!—
sings.
An icethorn—we too
had called—
gathers the tones.
* * *
EVENING, in
Hamburg, an
endless shoelace—at
which
the ghosts gnaw—
binds two bloody toes together
for the road’s oath.
* * *
AT THE ASSEMBLED
signs, in the
wordmembraned oiltent, at the outlet
of time,
groaned into brightness
soundlessly
—you, royal air, nailed
to the plague-cross, now
you bloom—,
pore-eyed,
pain-scaly, on
horseback.
* * *
THE UPWARD-STANDING COUNTRY,
cracked,
with the flightroot, to which
stonebreath accrues.
Here also
the seas rush in, out of the steep ravine,
and your speech-
pocked, panic
heretic
cruises.
* * *
THE PUSHED-AROUND
ever-light, loam yellow,
behind
planetheads.
Invented
looks, see-
scars,
carved into the spaceship,
beg for earth-
mouths.
* * *
ASHGLORY behind
your shaken-knotted
hands at the threeway.
Pontic erstwhile: here,
a drop,
on
the drowned rudder blade,
deep
in the petrified oath,
it roars up.
(On the vertical
breathrope, in those days,
higher than above,
between two painknots, while
the glossy
Tatarmoon climbed up to us,
I dug myself into you and into you.)
Ash-
glory behind
you threeway
hands.
The cast-in-front-of-you, from
the East, terrible.
No one
bears witness for the
witness.
* * *
IV
THE WRITTEN hollows itself, the
spoken, seagreen,
burns in the bays,
in the
liquified names
the dolphins dart,
in the eternalized Nowhere, here,
in the memory of the over-
loud bells in—where only?,
who
pants
in this
shadow-quadrat, who
from beneath it
shimmers, shimmers, shimmers?
* * *
CELLO-ENTRY
from behind pain:
The powers, escheloned
as the counterheavens,
roll inexplicables before
approach lane and arrival,
the
scaled evening
stands full of lungbranches,
two
blaze-clouds of breath
dig in the book
which the temple-din opened,
something comes true,
twelve times glows
the arrow-riddled yonder,
she, black-
biled, drinks
the blackbiled’s seed,
all is less, than
it is,
all is more.
* * *
FRIHED
In the house of the doubled delusion,
where the stone boats fly
over
Whiteking’s pier, toward the secrets,
where finally with
cut cord the
man-of-war-word cruises,
I, reed-pith nourished, am
in you, on
wild ducks’ ponds,
I sing—
what do I sing?
The saboteur’s
coat
with the red, with the white
circles around the
bullet
holes
—through them
you sight the with us driving
free-
starry Above—
covers us now,
the verdigris-nobility from the quay,
with its burned-brick thoughts
round about the forehead,
heaps the spirit round, the spindrift,
quick
the noises wither
this side and that side of mourning,
the crown’s
closer-
sailing pus-prong
in the eye of one
born crooked
writes poems
in Danish.
* * *
THE SILICIFIED SAYING in the fist,
you forget that you forget,
blinking, the punctuation marks
crystallize at the wrist,
through the earth
cleft to the crest
the pauses come riding,
there, by
the sacrifice-bush,
where memory catches fire,
the One Breath
seizes you.
* * *
WHERE?
In night’s friable matter.
In grief-debris and -drift,
in slowest uproar,
in the wisdom-shaft Never.
Waterneedles
sew the burst
shadow together—it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
* * *
KING’S RAGE, stonemaned, up front.
And the prayers,
gone up in smoke—
stallions, pain-
accrued, the
untamable-obedient
irregulars:
psalm-hoofed, singing across
open-, open-,
open-
leafed Biblemountains,
toward the clear, also
clattering,
mighty seagerms.
* * *
SOLVE
De-easterned tomb-
tree, split into
firebrands:
past the Poison-
Palatinates, past the cathedrals,
upstream, down-
stream rafted
by the tiny-flaring, by the
free
punctuation mark of the
script salvaged and dis-
solved into the count-
less to-be-
named un-
pronounceable
names.
* * *
COAGULA
Your wound
too, Rosa.
And the hornslight of your
Romanian buffaloes
in star’s stead above the
sandbed, in the
talking, red-
ember-mighty
alembic.
* * *
SKULLTHINKING, dumb, on the arrowtrace.
Your song of
song, into the hard
February-spark clamped,
half-shattered
jaw.
The one, still
to be traveled mile
Melancholy.
Ambushed now by the achieved, aimblue,
upright in the skiff,
also from the gnashing crag-
blessings released.
* * *
EASTERSMOKE, flooding, with
the letterlike
keeltrack amidst.
(Never was heaven.
But sea still is, fire red,
sea.)
We here, we,
glad for the passage, before the tent,
where you baked desertbread