Breathturn into Timestead

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,