by Paul Celan
inclusively-godly,
for the full-bottomed
wig,
a place,
future-baring,
steelfibergay,
for the testing
of the one-
off heartstab.
* * *
BEWINTERED windfield: here
you must live, granular, pomegranate-like,
hardpacked by
the not-to-be-mentioned prefrost,
darkening’s handwriting amidst
the goldyellow shadow—yet never
were you only bird and fruit—
of the star-bespat
supersonic wing,
you won
through song.
* * *
OUTSIDE. Quince-yellow a piece
of half-evening blows from
the drifting gaff,
the oaths,
graybacked, seaworthy,
roll
toward the galleon,
a
hangman’s
noose, the number drapes itself
around the neck of the still visi-
ble figure.
Nobody needs to take in the sails,
I journeyman
go.
* * *
WHO STOOD THE ROUND?
The weather was clear, we drank
and hollered the ash-chantey
about the great midsummer-average.
* * *
DYSPOSITION, I know
your knives swarming like
minnows,
closer to the wind than I
nobody sailed,
nobody more than I
was cut by the hail squall
to the seaclear knived
brain.
* * *
NO NAME, that would name:
its consonance
knots us under the
in song to be stiffened
lighttent.
* * *
IMAGINE
Imagine:
the moorsoldier from Masada
teaches himself homeland, in
the most inextinguishable way,
against
all barbs in the wire.
Imagine:
the eyeless without shape
lead you free through the throng, you
grow stronger and
stronger.
Imagine: your
own hand
has held once
more this
into life re-
suffered
piece of
inhabitable earth.
Imagine:
that came toward me,
awake to the name, awake to the hand,
forever,
from what cannot be buried.
Tenebrae’d
UNSCRUPULOUSLY,
against the obfuscations,
the hanging candlestick glows itself
downward, toward us
Manyarmed torch,
now searches for its iron, hears,
where from, from human skincloseness,
a hissing,
finds,
loses,
harsh
it reads, minutes long,
the heavy,
shimmering
behest.
* * *
AFTER THE LIGHTWAIVER:
the day, bright, re-
sounding from the errand.
The flowersome message,
shriller and shriller,
finds to the bleeding ear.
* * *
EXPLICIT, wide, the open
parenthesishug,
Release the lovers
also from the elmroot-arrest
Black-
tongued, ripe, at agony
becomes loud again, the quickening
draws closer.
* * *
FORCED OFF the high
wire, you fathom out
what’s to be expected
from so many gifts,
cheesy-white face
of the one who pounces on us,
Deploy the lightpointers, the light-
ciphers,
Immediately, as humans do,
darkness mixes in,
which you distinguish
among all these
unrepentent insubordination
games.
* * *
HEAVED FAR OVER
the heads:
the sign, dreamstrong, ablaze
at the place it named.
Now:
Wave with the sandleaf
until the sky
smokes.
* * *
DO YOU THROW
the written upon
anchor stone?
Nothing holds me here,
not the night of the living,
not the night of the intractable,
not the night of the nimble,
Come, together let’s roll the doorstone
in front of the untamed tent.
* * *
CONTESTED STONE,
graygreen, discharged
into the narrow.
Unhuckstered glowmoons
floodlight
the small matter Earth:
so you too were
that.
In the memory fissures
the autonomous candles stand
and adjudge power.
* * *
TENEBRAE’D
the keypower.
The tusk rules,
up from the chalktrace,
against the world-
second.
* * *
SHOVEL THE VOID into the eyebags,
the sacrificecall, the saltflood,
come with me to breath
and out beyond.
* * *
IRRUPTION of the undifferentiated
into your language,
nightshimmer,
counterspell, stronger.
By a foreign, high
floodflow washed out—
this
life.
* * *
WITH US, the
tossed about, yet
traveling:
the one
unharmed,
not usurpable,
rebellious
grief.
Lightduress
I
SOUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS, on
ward onethousandandone,
daynightly
the Bear Polka:
they retrain you,
you again become
he.
* * *
NIGHT RODE HIM, he had come to,
the orphan’s frock as flag,
no more false runs
it rode him straight—
It is, it is,
as though oranges stood in the privet,
as though the thus ridden wore nothing
but his
first
birthmarked, se-
cret-speckled
skin.
* * *
MUSSELHEAP: with
the screemace I drove inbetween,
following the rivers to the
melting ice-
homeland,
toward it, the firestone,
to be incised according
to whose sign, in
the dwarfbirchbalm.
Lemmings burrowed.
No Later.
No
bowl urn, no
pierced necklace,
no starfoot-
fibula.
Unappeased,
unconnected, artless,
the all-transforming slowly
scraping
climbed after me.
* * *
SCOOPED WITH THE ASHLADLE
from the Beingtrough,
soapy, at
the second
try, toward
each other,
incomprehensibly fed now,
far
outside our and already—wherefore?—
heaved asunder,
then (at the third
try?) blown
behind the horn, before the
standing
tear-brink,
once, twice, thrice,
from unpaired,
budding-cleft
flaggy
lung.
* * *
LARDED WITH MICROLITHS,
giving-given away
hands.
The conversation, spinning itself
from tip to tip,
singed by
spraying blaze-air.
A sign
combs it together
as answer for a
brooding rockart.
* * *
GONE INTO THE NIGHT, helperish,
a star-
permeable leaf
instead of the mouth:
something remains
for wild wasting,
treeward.
* * *
WE ALREADY LAY
deep in the underbrush, when you
finally crept along.
But we could not
darken over toward you:
there reigned
lightduress.
* * *
CONTACT MINES on your left
moons, Saturn.
Shardsealed
the orbits out there.
Now must be the moment
for a just
birth.
* * *
WHO SIDED WITH YOU?
The lark-shaped
stone from the fallow.
No sound, only the deathwatchlight lends
a hand.
The height
whirls itself
out, more fiercely even
than you.
* * *
REFLECTION-LADEN, by the
heavensbeetles,
in the mountain.
The death
you owed me, I
carry it
out.
* * *
CLEARED, this start
also.
Bow-wheelchant with
fermata.
The duskrudder responds,
your torn-
awake vein
unknots itself,
what’s left of you, slants,
you gain
altitude.
* * *
BEACON-
collector, nightly,
a bellyful,
at finger’s tip the guide beam,
for him, the single lan-
ding
wordbull.
Beacon-
master.
* * *
A YOU, cast in lost matter,
accurate to the mask,
along the lid-
crease with
one’s own
lidcrease to be near you,
the trace and the trace
to strew it with gray,
final, deathly.
* * *
WHAT THREW
us together,
scare-scatters,
a worldstone, sun-distant,
hums.
* * *
II
ONCE, death was much in demand,
you hid in me.
* * *
HATCHETSWARMS
above us,
conversations
with socket-axes in the lowland—
Islandpasture, you,
with the hope
fogging you
in.
* * *
PRECOGNITION bleeds
twice behind the curtain,
Cognizance
pearls
* * *
TWO AT BRANCUSI’S
If one among these stones
were to tell
what conceals it:
here, nearby,
on the old man’s crutch-stick,
it would open, as a wound,
into which you’d have to dive,
lonely,
far from my scream, the already also
hewn, white one.
* * *
WHERE I forgot myself in you,
you became thought,
something
rushes through us both:
the world’s first
of the last
wings,
the hide
spreads over my
storm-riddled
mouth,
you
come not
to
you.
* * *
LONG AGO boarded mudskiff.
A but-
ton, come
off,
nitpicks every buttercup,
the hour, the toad,
takes its world off the hinges.
If I gulped down the cartrut,
I’d be there too.
* * *
TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,
in the
Hütte,
written in the book
—whose name did it record
before mine?—,
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker’s
word
to come,
in the heart,
forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,
raw exchanges, later, while driving,
clearly,
he who drives us, the mensch,
he also hears it,
the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.
* * *
SINK away from
the crook of my arm,
take the One
pulse beat along,
hide yourself in it,
outside.
* * *
NOW, that the prayerstools burn,
I eat the book
with all the
insignia.
* * *
TO A BROTHER IN ASIA
The auto-transfigured
cannons
drive toward heaven,
ten
bombers yawn,
a running fire blooms,
as surely as peace,
a handful of rice
expires as your friend.
* * *
JOSTLED along the delusion-run
by someone who read:
Scab and scurf. Scurf and scab.
To vault the sleep-buck, O once.
* * *
HOW YOU die out in me:
even in the last
threadbare
breath-knot
you stick with one
splinter
life.
* * *
HIGHGATE
An angel walks through the room—:
you, close to the unopened book,
absolve me
once again.
Twice the heather finds nourishment.
Twice it pales.
* * *
BY LIGHTNING SCARED, untransformed, barely
balking:
Géricault’s
horse,
already
healed by your needle-glances
over and over.
Even here in this
thunderstorm
you break it in.
A stepstone, still far from your foot,
waves with the one
reddish
strand from my beard.
* * *
III
DISCUS, bestarred
with pre-faces,
throw yourself
out of yourself.
* * *
KNOCK the
lightwedges off:
dusk has
the swimming word.
* * *
THE ESCAPED
gray parrots
say mass
in your mouth.
You hear the rain
and guess, this time too
it’s God.
* * *
IN THE DARKCLEARINGS I learned it:
you live toward me, nevertheless,