Breathturn into Timestead

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-
/>   lowed.

  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-