by Paul Celan
from wandered-along language.
At the farthest sight-edge: the dance
of two blades across the
heartshadowcord.
The net underneath, knotted
from thought-
ends—at what
depth?
There: the bitten through
eternity-penny, spat
up to us through the meshes.
Three sandvoices, three
scorpions:
the guest-people, with us
in the skiff.
* * *
QUAYWALL-REST, astride,
in the shadow of the
trumps fanned open
from above—
your
worn-out
hands, coarser than ever,
reach elsewhere.
The scooping, again
and again
slopping over, to be
spilled, cup full of bile.
The slightly
hither-bent,
upstream-steered
wander-vessels, passing
hard by your kneescab.
Ashlar, ride.
Grayfaith next to me,
drink
up.
* * *
ANSWERED
by the transferred sparks
the fire-fragrance around
the pricket.
All
orbits are free.
Several earths
I lob to you while going blind—
the two
white ones you keep, one
in each hand.
The un-
buried, uncounted, up there,
the children,
are ready to jump—
You,
source-nightly, I
did not resemble:
you, joyous as
you now hover, are
impaled by the invisible, second,
standing firebrand.
* * *
SIGHT THREADS, SENSE THREADS, from
nightbile knitted
behind time:
who
is invisible enough
to see you?
Mantle-eye, almondeye, you came
through all the walls,
climb
on this pulpit,
roll, what lies there, up again—
Ten blindstaffs,
fiery, straight, free,
float from the just
born sign,
stand
above it.
It is still us.
* * *
A ROAR: it is
truth itself
stepped among
mankind,
right into the
metaphor-flurry.
* * *
LUNATIC-BOWLS, rotten
depths.
Were I— —
Well, yes, were I
the—whither bent?—
ashtree outside,
I would know how to accompany you,
shining graydish with the
quickly-to-be-gulped
down image, marbling you,
and the tightly
drawn, flickering
thought-circle around you
both.
* * *
LICHTENBERG’S TWELVE with the tablecloth
inherited napkins—a
planet-greeting to
the language-towers everywhere
in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign-
zone.
Being
—no heaven is, no
earth, and the
memory of both extinguished
but for the one
ashtree-believing nuthatch—,
his
from the city-ramparts gathered
white comet.
A voice-rift, to
preserve him, in
the universe.
The redlorn of a
thought-
thread. The bur-
geoned laments
about it, the lament
below it—whose
sound?
With it—don’t ask
where—
I nearly—
don’t say where, when, again.
* * *
GIVE THE WORD
Cut to the brains—half? three quarters?—,
you give, benighted, the passwords—these:
“Tatararrows.”
“Artpap.”
“Breath.”
All are coming, no one’s missing.
(Siphets and probyls are among them.)
A man comes.
Worldapplesize, the teardrop beside you,
swept through, crossed
by answer,
answer,
answer.
Iced-through—by whom?
“Pass,” you say,
“pass,”
“pass.”
The quiet lepra peels off your palate
and fans light to your tongue,
light.
* * *
FROM BEHOLDING THE BLACKBIRDS, evenings,
through the unbarred, that
surrounds me,
I promised myself weapons.
From beholding the weapons—hands,
from beholding the hands—the long ago
by the sharp, flat
pebble written line
—Wave, you
carried it hither, honed it,
gave yourself, un-
losable, up,
shoresand, you take,
take in,
sea oats, blow
yours along—,
the line, the line,
through which we swim, entwined,
twice each millennium,
all that singing at the fingers,
that even the through us living,
magnificent-unexplainable
flood does not believe us.
* * *
V
GREAT, GLOWING VAULT
with the
outward- and away-
burrowing black-constellation swarm:
into the silicified forehead of a ram
I burn this image, between
the horns, therein,
in the singing of the coils, the
marrow of the curdled
heartseas swells.
What
doesn’t he
butt against?
The world is gone, I have to carry you.
* * *
SLATE-EYED ONE, reached
by the striding counterscript the
day after the blinding.
Readable bloodclot-messenger,
hither-died, despite all,
carried by knowing barbedwire-wings
over the undisplaceable
thousand-wall.
You here, you: quickened
by the breath of the
names
caught in the free-
shoveled lungbranches.
To-
be-deciphered you.
With you,
on the vocalcords’ bridge, in the
great Inbetween,
nightover.
Shot at with hearttones,
from all the world-pulpits.
* * *
OOZY, then
weedy silence of the shores.
The one sluice yet. At
the warttower, doused
with brackish,
you empty into.
Before you, in
the rowing giant sporangia,
as if words panted there, a
luster sickles.
* * *
YOU, THE hair taken from
the lip with the bright-
seeing highsleep:
threaded through the goldeye
of the sung-aright ash-
needle.
You, the knot torn out
of the throat
with
the One Light:
run through by needle and hair,
under way, under way.
Your reversals, incessantly, round
the seven-
fingered kisshand behind
happiness.
* * *
THE WITH HEAVENS HEATED
firefissure through the world.
The Who’s there?–calls
inside it:
mirror-cast through you here
onto the shield
of the Eternal Bug,
sniffed around by False and Bewildered,
looping the unending loop, nevertheless,
which stays navigable for the un-
towed answer.
* * *
VAPORBAND-, BANDEROLE-UPRISING,
redder than red,
during the great
frost-thrusts, on
sliding ice-bucklings, before
seal nations.
The beam hammered all
the way through you,
that writes here,
redder than red.
With its words
to shuck you out of the brainshell, here,
hastily buried October.
With you to coin the gold, now,
when it dies out of.
With you to assist the banderoles.
With you to moor the glasshard leaflet
to the blood-bollard, that
the earth pushed out
through this step-pole.
* * *
REST IN YOUR WOUNDS,
blubbered out, lulled.
The round, small, the firm:
from the gazeniches it comes
rolling, nearby,
into no kind of cloth.
(It has
—Pearl, it was
so difficult through you—,
it has, diving, won the saltbush,
over there, in the Twosea.)
Without light it rolls, without
color—you,
stick the ivory needle through it
—who doesn’t know
that the tigered stone, that jumped you,
rang out on it?—,
and so—whither fell earth?—
let it turn time-up,
with ten nailmoons on the towrope,
in serpent-nearness, at yellow-flood,
quasistellar.
* * *
VI
ONCE,
I did hear him,
he did wash the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and unending,
annihilated,
I’ed.
Light was. Salvation.
Threadsuns
I
EYE-GLANCES, whose winks,
no brightness sleeps.
Undebecome, everywhere,
gather yourself,
stand.
* * *
FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER
Blind, light-
bearded partition.
A cockchaferdream
floodlights it.
Behind it, complaint-rastered,
Freud’s forehead opens up,
the tear, hard-
silenced outside,
links on with the sentence:
“For the last
time psycho-
logy.”
The imitation
jackdaw
breakfasts.
The glottal stop
sings.
* * *
CHANCE, MARKED—the signs, unscattered,
the number, multiplied, unjustly flowered around,
the Lord someone fugitive-close, raining, who looks,
as lies seven-
blaze, knives
flatter, crutches
perjure themselves, U-
under
this
world
the ninth already burrows,
lion,
you sing the humansong
of tooth and soul, both
hardnesses.
* * *
WHO
RULES?
Thronged by colors, life, harried by numbers.
The watch
steals its time from the comet,
the swords
fish,
the name
gilds the ruses,
the touch-me-not, helmeted,
ciphers the periods in the stone.
Pain, as slugshadow.
I hear, it won’t become later.
Fay and false, in the saddle,
gauge this here too.
Globelamps instead of yours.
Lighttraps, border-idolatrish, instead
of our houses.
The black-diaphanous
juggler jaws
in lower
culmination.
The hard-won umlaut in the unword:
your reflection: the tombshield
of one of the wordshadows
here.
* * *
THE TRACE OF A BITE in the nowhere.
It too
you have to fight,
from here on out.
* * *
IN THE ETERNAL DEPTH: the brick-
mouths
rave.
You blow up a prayer
before each.
Letterfaithful, on the emergency trail,
stand Up and Down,
the krater full of bubbly
brain.
* * *
VISIBLE, by brainstem and heartstem,
undarkened, terrestrial,
the midnight marksman, mornings,
chases the twelvesong through
the marrow of treason and putrefaction.
* * *
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 à 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.
* * *
SACKCLOTH-MOLD, tower-high.
Eye slot
for the destarred
at the end of the grief-fibril.
The eyelash-seam, at a slant
to the god-blazes.
In the mouthbay the place
for the rowing
Kaisertwitter.
The. And the Going-with-
him across smokeblue,
blank
tableland, you.
* * *
SPASMS, I love you, psalms,
the feeling-walls deep in the you-ravine
rejoice, seedpainted one,
Eternal, de-eternalized you are
eternalized, Uneternal, you,
hey,
into you, into you
I sing the bone-rod-incisions
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-circlet.
* * *
YOUR EYES IN THE ARM
the
asunder-burned,
to go on rocking you, in the fly-
ing heartshadow, you.
Where?
Arrange the place, arrange the word.
Extinguish. Measure.
Ash-brightness, ash-ell—swal-
Mismeasure, unmeasure, misplaced, unworded,
unwo
ash-
hiccup, your eyes
in the arm,
always.
* * *
HENDAYE
The orange pepperwort,
stick it behind your forehead,
silence the barb out of the wire,
with which she flatters, even now,
listen to it,
for the span of an impatience.
* * *
PAU, BY NIGHT
The immortality cypher, by Henry
the Fourth rocked in
to tortoise-nobility,
sneers eleatically
behind itself.
* * *
PAU, LATER
In the corner of
your eyes, stranger,
the Albigenses-shadow—
after
the Waterloo-Plein,
toward the orphaned
raffia shoe, toward
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-