by Paul Celan
cork.
* * *
ASLANT,
as for us all,
the single hearing-flap
perches on you,
free,
and the deafness in you,
over there, by the temple-firn,
ceases to bloom now, with fool’s
bells on each
sepal.
* * *
THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle
at midnight, in feeble
ignition key glimmer.
There are too many
goalcrazed powers
even in this
seemingly starstudded
highair.
The longed for freemile
crashes into us.
* * *
UNKEPT.
Dreamed aslant, joined.
The oil around—
thickened.
With bulging thoughts
pain busies itself.
Mourning, gone awry.
Melancholy, put up with anew,
finds its level.
* * *
THE UNCONDITIONAL CHIMING
behind the masticated tristesse.
Guiding rods, compact,
in the time-blackened emblem.
Frostfurrows along
the motto.
All that in the
birthmark’s half-light.
* * *
ETERNITY ages: in
Cerveteri the
asphodels
question each other white.
With mumbling ladle,
from the deads’ cauldrons,
o’er the stone, o’er the stone,
they spoon soups
into all the beds
and camps.
* * *
LATE. A spongy fetish
bites off the cones of the Christmas tree,
roughened up by
frostsayings
a wish bobs after them,
the window flies open, we’re outside,
unplaneable,
the lump Being,
a nose-heavy,
depth-enjoying cloud
chauffeurs us even over
that.
* * *
THE SEEDLINGS—causa secunda—lease
the overcertain
pupil-enslaved
nothing,
which still skirts your—why
only?—even still today up-
twitching brow,
when I look at it, for the
sake of the maybe
still to be given
eye-oath below it.
* * *
ALONG THE HILL LINES
the pretty torture racks between
treeling and treeling,
honeysuckled in,
Dumdum horizons, before them,
milliplied, yes,
your
Hear-Silver,
spinet,
daynight full of whirring lungs,
the
disbranched archangels stand
guard here.
* * *
COME, we’re ladling
nerve cells
—the duck’s porridge, multipolar,
of the light-emptied ponds—
from the
rhomboid
fossas.
Ten tendons draw forth
half-recognizables
from the still reachable centers.
* * *
DESLAGGED, deslagged.
If we were knives now,
unsheathed like back then
in the pergola in Paris, the time of an eye-ember,
the arctic bull
would leap in
would crown his horns with us
would thrust, would thrust.
* * *
SOULBLIND, behind the ashes,
in the holy-meaningless word,
the disrhymed comes walking,
his cerebral mantle draped lightly over the shoulders,
the ear canal irradiated
with reticulated vowels,
he deconstructs the visual purple,
reconstructs it.
* * *
BORDERESS: night.
Vigorous dwarf- and giant-growth, de-
pending on the cut in the fingertip,
on what
emerges from it.
Too many-eyed at times,
when, biconcavely,
a thought adds its drop,
not from her.
* * *
GULLCHICKS, silvery,
beg the adult bird:
the red spot on the lower
beak, which is yellow.
Black—a decoy
head demonstrates it for you—
was a stronger stimulus. Blue also
works, but it is not
the color stimulus that does it:
it has to be a
stimulus-figure, a whole,
completely
configured,
a pregiven inheritance.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Friend,
you tardrenched sackracer,
here also, on this
shore, you go down
both time and eternity’s
wrong
pipe.
* * *
IV
IRISH
Give me the right of way
across the grain ladder into your sleep,
the right of way
across the sleep trail,
the right, for me to cut peat
along the heart’s hillside,
tomorrow.
* * *
THE ROPES, salt-water-clammy:
the white
topknot—this time
it does not come undone.
On the seagrass chute next to it,
in anchor’s shadow,
a name teases the
untwinned
riddle.
* * *
DEW. And I lay with you, thee, in the rubble,
a mushy moon
pelted us with answer,
we crumbled apart
we brittled back together:
the Lord broke the bread,
the bread broke the Lord.
* * *
LAVISH MESSAGE
in a crypt, where
we flap with
our gasflags,
we stand here
in the odor
of sanctity, yep.
Singed
vapor waves of the beyond
thickly drift from our pores,
in each second
tooth-
cavity an un-
destructable hymn wakes up.
The clump of twilight you throw down to us,
come, swallow it too down.
* * *
THIS DAY, rolled out:
the many-thousand-years-old dough
for the later
hunic flat cake,
a just-as-old
jaw, somewhat oozy,
commemorates all early times,
and bares its teeth against them and itself,
hoof-
beats of the protoanimal to the
yeast-arioso:
it goes, flat-cake beautiful singable growth,
still and always upward,
a shadow-
less spirit, dis-
lonelied, an
immortal,
shivers
blissfully.
* * *
OILY still
the die’s One swims
between brow and brow,
stops here,
lidless, follows
your gaze.
* * *
YOU WITH THE
in the darkglass gazed at,
you One
with the beheld
substanceless light-mirror-surface innermost:
through the ten-
<
br /> towered desert gate your
messenger-self steps before you, stands,
for the length of a trivowel,
in the high
redness,
as if the people in the distances
were once again gathered around you.
* * *
OUT OF ANGEL-MATTER, on the day
of the ensouling, phallically
united in the One
—He, the Enlivening-Just, slept you toward me,
sister—, upward
streaming through the channels, up
into the rootcrown:
parted
she hoists us up, equal-eternal,
with standing brain, a bolt of lightning
sews our skulls aright, the pans
and all
the still-to-be-dissemened bones:
strewn from the East, to be harvested in the West: equal-eternal—,
where this script burns, after the
threequarter-death, before
the rolling around remainder-
soul, which
writhes in crownfear,
since ur-ever.
* * *
THE FREE-BLOWN LIGHTCROP
in the under worldblood
standing furrows.
A hand with the shimmer of the urlight
poaches beyond
the ferny dams:
as if there still starved
any stomach,
as if there fluttered
any still-to-be-
fertilized eye.
* * *
LINE THE WORDCAVES
with panther skins,
widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,
sense-hither and sense-thither,
give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors
and wildnesses, parietal,
and listen for their second
and each time second and second
tone.
* * *
THE HIGHWORLD—lost, the delusion-ride, the day-ride.
Ascertainable, from here on out,
the with the rose in the fallow year
home-sensed Nowhere.
* * *
THE MUTTERING
arms-
passes.
On the leaped over
step
the deathdoodads
diddle.
* * *
… THOUGH NO KIND OF
peace.
Graynights, preconscious-cool.
Stimuli-quanta, otterlike,
over consciousness-gravel
on the way to
memory-vesicles.
The grisaille of matter.
A halfpain, a second, without
permanent trace, halfway
here. A halfpleasure.
The moved. The cathexed.
Repetition-compulsion-
monochrome.
* * *
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.
* * *
THROW THE SOLAR YEAR, to which you cling,
over the heart railings
and row to, starve yourself away, copulating:
two germ cells, two metazoons,
that’s what you were,
the inanimate, the homeland,
now requests return—:
later, who knows,
one of you two, transformed,
may reemerge,
a slipper animalcule,
ciliated,
in the shield.
* * *
BECAUSE YOU FOUND THE WOE-SHARD
in the deserted settlement,
the shadow-centuries relax by your side
and hear you think:
Maybe it is true
that here peace debated two peoples,
from clay pots.
* * *
IT HAS COME THE TIME:
The brainsickle, unsheathed,
lounges in the sky,
rumbled by gallstars,
the antimagnets, the rulers,
sound off.
* * *
LIPS, ERECTILE-TISSUE of the You-night:
Hairpincurve-glances are climbing up,
making out the commissure,
sew themselves fast here—:
No admittance! Blacktoll.
There should still be glowworms.
* * *
V
PRINCIPALITIES, POWERS.
Back of them, in the bamboo:
yelping lepra, symphonic.
Vincent’s offered
ear
has reached its goal.
* * *
DAYBOMBARDMENT: the
light-permeable thorn-
temple
grabs just one
more dewfresh
darkness.
At the heart’s apex a
musclefiber comes
musing to death.
* * *
SPEECHWALLS, space inward—
spooled in upon yourself,
you holler yourself through all the way to the lastwall.
The fogs are burning.
The heat hangs itself inside you.
* * *
ORPHANED in the stormtrough
the four ells of earth,
shadowed in, the heavenly
writer’s archives,
moored in, Michael
mired in, Gabriel
fermented in the stone lightning,
the share.
* * *
OF BOTH: the de-scarred bodies,
of both: the deathleaf over their nakedness,
of both: the de-realized faces.
Pulled onto land by
the whitest root
of the whitest
tree.
* * *
ROLLED-AWAY incest-stone.
An eye, cut from
the doctor’s kidney,
reads in Hippocrates’s stead
the perjured oath’s makeup.
Explosions, sleepbombs, goldgas.
I swim, I swim
* * *
AS COLORS, piled up,
the beings return, evenings, clamorously,
a quartermonsoon
without sleeping place,
a patterprayer
before the ignited
lidlessnesses.
* * *
THE CHIMNEY SWALLOW stood at the zenith, the arrow-
sister,
the One of the air-clock
flew toward the hour hand,
deep into the chiming,
the shark
spat out the living Inca,
it was conquest-time
in Manland,
everything
went about,
unsealed like us.
* * *
WHITE, white, white
like lattice whitewash
the laws fall into line
and march
inward.
* * *
BARE ONE. Udderly
chest-thumping you.
Your funk wafted,
in the face of all.
No one’s
breath regrowths, un-
redressable one.
The stonecap-king up front
falls from the stone donkey’s rump,
clammy hands
over the tit-lashed
face.
* * *
THE SILENCE-BUTT against you,
the silence-butts.
Coastlike
you survive yourself
in time’s transshipment ports,
in paired paths’ nearness,
where the pinheaded ice-crew
beheavens the stockrooms.
* * *
HAUT MAL
Unexpiated,
narcoleptic,
stained by the gods:
your tongue is smutty,
your urine black,
watery-bilious your stool,
you hold forth,
as I do,
lubriciously,
you put one foot before the other,
put one hand on the other,
cuddle up in goatfur,
you hallow
my member.
* * *
THE PIGEON-EGG-SIZE GROWTH
on the nape:
a thoughtgame,