by Paul Celan
deaths,
stocked in honeycomb-troughs,
bits
on chips,
the menorah-poem from Berlin,
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
cared for? A
-live?),
reading stations in the late-word,
dotted pilotlights line
the sky,
crestlines under fire,
feelings, frost-
spindled,
cold start—
with hemoglobin.
* * *
SOURCEPOINTS, at night,
on the expressways,
expectant of the gods,
your foothills, Brainmountain,
in the heart-you,
by them
foamed around.
* * *
TREKSCOWTIME,
the halftransformed pull
at one of the worlds,
the diselevated one, interiorized,
speaks under the foreheads on the bank:
Quits with death, quits with
God.
* * *
YOU BE LIKE YOU, always.
Stant up Jherosalem inde
erheyff dich
Even he who cut the band with you,
inde wirt
erluchtet
tied it anew, in the gehugnis,
mudclots I swallowed, in the tower,
language, dark pilaster strip,
kumi
ori.
* * *
DO NOT WORK AHEAD,
do not send out,
stand
inward:
transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ’s pre-Script,
not overtakable,
I take you in,
instead of any
rest.
Snowpart
I
UNWASHED, UNPAINTED,
in Hereafter’s
pithead:
there
where we find ourselves,
Earthy, always,
a
belated
bucket conveyor pierces
us cloudtorn,
upward, downward,
seditious
piping inside, on Fool’s
legs,
the flightshadow in
the iridescing round
heals us in, into seven-
heighth,
ice-age-close
the feltswan pair steers
through the hovering
stone-icon
* * *
YOU LIE in the great listening,
ambushed, snowed in.
Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Sweden—
Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Eden—
The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for none, for everyone—
The Landwehr canal will not roar.
Nothing
stalls.
* * *
LILAC AIR with yellow windowstains,
Orion’s belt above the
Anhalter ruin,
flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,
from
standing bar to
snow bar.
* * *
WELLDIGGER in the wind:
someone will play the viola, day downward, in the alehouse,
someone will stand on his head in the word Enough,
someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch.
This year
does not roar across,
it throws back December, November,
it turns up its wounds,
it opens up to you, young
grave-
well,
twelvemouth.
* * *
THE BREACHED YEAR
with the moldering crust
delusion bread.
Drink
from my mouth.
* * *
UNREADABILITY of this
world. Everything doubles.
The strong clocks
agree with the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
forever.
* * *
WHORISH ELSE. And eternity
bloodblack circumbabeled.
Mudflood-swamped
by your loamy locks,
my faith.
Two fingers, far from the hand,
a-row the moory
oath.
* * *
WHAT SEWS
at this voice? On what
does this
voice
sew
hither, beyond?
The chasms are
sworn in on White, from them
arose
the snowneedle,
swallow it,
you order the world,
that counts
as much as nine names,
named on knees,
tumuli, tumuli,
you
hill away, alive,
come
into the kiss,
a flip of the fin,
steady,
lights up the bays,
you drop
anchor, your shadow
strips you off on the bush,
arrival,
descent,
a chafer recognizes you,
you approach
each other,
caterpillars
spin you in,
the Great
Sphere
grants you passage through,
soon
the leaf buttons its vein to yours,
sparks
have to cross through
for the length of a breathdistress,
you are entitled to a tree, a day,
it decodes the number,
a word with all its green
enters itself, transplants itself,
follow it
* * *
I HEAR THE AXE HAS BLOSSOMED,
I hear the place is unnamable,
I hear the bread that looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread the woman baked for him,
I hear they call life
the only shelter.
* * *
WITH THE VOICE OF THE FIELDMOUSE
you squeak up,
a sharp
clamp,
you bite through the shirt into my skin,
a cloth,
you slide across my mouth,
midway through my
words weighing you, shadow,
down.
* * *
IN LIZARD-
skins, Epi-
leptic one,
I bed you, on the cornices,
the gable-
holes
bury us, with lightdung.
* * *
SNOWPART, arched, to the last,
in the updraft, before
the forever dewindowed
huts:
flatdreams skip
over the
chamfered ice;
to carve out
the wordshadows, to stack them
around the cramp
in the crater.
* * *
II
THE TO-BE-RESTUTTERED WORLD,
whose guest I
will have been, a name,
sweated down the wall,
up which a wound licks.
* * *
YOU WITH THE DARKNESS SLINGSHOT,
you with the stone:
it is overevening,
I light behind myself.
&
nbsp; Take me down,
be serious about
us.
* * *
ENJANUARIED
in the thorned
rockshelter. (Get drunk
and call it
Paris.)
The shoulder, freezesealed;
immobile
tawdry owls on it;
letters between the toes;
certainty.
* * *
BE SLOPPY, Pain,
don’t slap her face
you yourself botch
the sand boil in
the white Beside.
* * *
PARCELED GOODS baked,
groschen-size, from
over-ripe light;
desperation thrown in,
scatter-grit;
lifted up onto the rail, the full
shadow-wheel truck.
* * *
FROM ABEAM
come in, as the night,
the jury rig
billows,
enshrined
aboard
is your scream,
you were there, you are below,
down below you are,
I go, I go with the fingers
from me,
to see you,
with the fingers, you, the One Below,
the arm stumps run riot,
the beacon thinks
for the single-
star sky,
with the sword keel
I pick you up.
* * *
WOODFACED,
slackmawed
fool above the treadwheel:
from your earlobe
hangs and
hops your eye,
greened.
* * *
LARGO
Thought-sister, heath stroll close:
sur-
dying-
large we
lie next to each other, fall
crocus swarms
under your breathing lids,
the pair of blackbirds hangs
out near us, under our
together up there
drifting along white
meta-
stases.
* * *
TO NIGHTORDER ridden-
over, sledded-
over, stormed-
over,
un-
sung, un-
vanquished, un-
entwined, planted in
front of the insanity tents
soulbearded, hailstone-
eyed whitepebble-
stutterer.
* * *
TO SPEAK WITH the blind alleys
of the opposite,
of its
expatriated
meaning—:
to chew
this bread, with
writing-teeth.
* * *
SOMETHING LIKE NIGHT, sharper-
tongued than
yesterday, than tomorrow;
something like her
fishmouthed greeting
over the sorrow-
bar;
something blown together
in children’s fists;
something of my
and of no substance.
* * *
III
WHY THIS SUDDEN AT-HOMENESS, all-out, all-in?
I can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike,
you yourself slay your brothers:
earlier than they
I was with you, Snowed One.
Throw your tropes
in with the rest:
Someone wants to know,
why with God I
was no different than with you,
someone
wants to drown in that,
two books instead of lungs,
someone who stabbed himself into
you, bebreathes the cut,
someone, he was the one closest to you,
gets lost to himself,
someone adorns your sex
with your and his betrayal,
maybe
I was both
* * *
WHY, FROM THE UNCREATED,
given that, in the end, its awaits you again,
stand out? Why,
believer in seconds, these
delusion wages?
Metalgrowth, soulgrowth, nothinggrowth.
Mercurius as Christ,
a philosopher’s pebble, upriver
the sign interpreted
to shreds,
carbonized, rotted, watered,
unrevealed, certain
magnalia.
* * *
MAPESBURY ROAD
Waved toward you,
the quiet from behind
the step of a black woman.
By her side
the
magnolia-houred half-watch
of a red,
that also searches for meaning elsewhere—
or maybe nowhere.
The full
timehalo around
a lodged bullet, next to it, brainish.
The sharply heavened spacy
sips sharedair.
You—do not adjourn yourself.
* * *
THE OVERLOADED CALL: your
companion, nameable,
next to the dinged bookedge:
come with the reading shimmer,
it is
the barricade.
* * *
DARKENED FORTH, once more
your talk reaches
the foreshadowed leaf-shoot of
the beech tree.
Nothing can
be done or gotten from you
you are enfied to a strangeness.
Endlessly
I hear the stone stand in you.
* * *
WITH YOU, RAGDOLL, to fiddle, the
ragman’s cart comes a-
jazzing, it’s over there
we want,
the muted
trumpet
breathes us time-up,
into the hardest
ear of this world,
then also
jams red-
wood between our
for-pleasure and for-harm,
then,
when it hoes us free,
you crumble plumb into
my being.
* * *
THE RUNIC ONE TOO changes lanes:
amidst
the arrest-squad
he scrapes him-
self, arresting-arrested, red,
carrot, sister,
with your peels
plant me, the moory one, free
from his
Tomorrow,
in the
high buckets, near
the recalled tinder-sponge,
as-
cended into the phallic
braintransplant, overdays
the forever daily’d
woundstone.
* * *
YOUR, EVEN YOUR
falsenotes-suffused shadow
I gave a chance,
him, him too
I stoned with my
straightshadowed, straight-
pealed me—a
six-star,
toward which you silenced yourself,
today
silence yourself, whereto you want,
hurling what time undersanctified,
long since, me too, in the street,
I step, not to receive a heart,
toward me out into the
stony-many.
* * *
WALLSLOGAN
Disfigured—an angel, anew, stops dead—
a face comes to itself,
the astral-
weapon with
the memoryshaft:
attentively it greets
its
thinking lions.
* * *
FOR ERIC
Illuminated
a conscience rams
the hither and thither
plague-ridden equation,
later than early: earlier
time holds the brusk
rebellious scales,
just as you, son,
hold my with you arrowing
hand.
* * *
WHO DOESN’T PLOUGH UP SOMETHING?
He. This time.
Untilled
his land stands into the sense of his sun-
nights.
He names us.
Yes, he roustabouts.
Yes, he approves, he beloams,
what you smelt
pre-site,
post-site,
above-site, fallow,
against the ores,
at the very bottom,
alive.
* * *
GILLYFLOWERS, cat-enfranchised.
With wife
on your right, this lawn.
Rod- and moonsickle-stalemate.
You shouldn’t, thus, like you, behind bars, back then,