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Breathturn into Timestead

Page 11

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,

 

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