by Paul Celan
the
Maltese Jew, big-
lipped—him
the bone jumped, abrupter
than I, the bone
that someone already from tomorrow threw—,
you
should not
look up to heaven, you left
him then, as he you,
stranded,
side-lit.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Sister chestnut, multifoliate,
with your blank overhither.
* * *
YOU TRANSFATHOM
colorpush, numbertoss, misconception,
many
say:
it’s you, we disknow it,
many negate themselves on you,
you who affirm them one by
one for yourself,
insurrectionary like
the stonecourage,
given as present to the handsaid,
who raised himself to the world
at the seam of the turned silence
and of all danger.
* * *
FOR ERIC
In the megaphone
history excavates,
in the suburbs the tanks crawl,
our glass
fills up with silk,
we stand.
* * *
YOUR BLONDSHADOW, swim-
snaffle bridled,
waves the watershabrack,
—you too
would have a right to Paris,
if more bitter you
innered yourself—,
your haunchmark, colorless
it sketches the half-
near levade.
* * *
THE ABYSSES ROAM: humgravel—:
you can sort that out
with feelings of numbness
and unsleep,
and if—the baits haunt
the flagpole to the top—,
if here too the
nightmare-emblems fluttered by,
you would be, plundering yourself,
domineeringly-even,
their fission.
* * *
YOUR MANE-ECHO
—I rinsed its stone—,
studded with hoarfrost,
with unsealed
forehead be-
famed
by me.
* * *
IV
THE IN-EAR-DEVICE sprouts a bloom,
you are its year, you are dis-
cussed by the tongueless world,
one in six
knows this.
* * *
THE HALFGNAWED pennant
devours all lands away from the sea,
all seas away from the land,
a further name
—hey, you, animate yourself!—
has to endure
a cipher,
uncountable you:
you are one un-
sign
ahead of them
all.
* * *
A LEAF, treeless,
for Bertolt Brecht:
What times are these
when a conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes so much
that’s already been said.
* * *
PLAYTIME: the windows, they too,
read you all that secrecy
from your whirls
and mirror it
in the jelly-eyed beyond,
but
here too,
where you miss the color, a human sheers off, unmuted,
where the number tries to ape you,
breath clots, toward you,
strengthened
the hour stops next to you,
you speak,
you stand,
most firm above
the parabelized messengers
by voice
by matter.
* * *
OUT OF FUTURE-PAST FATE
stand the steps,
what’s poured in the ear
emancipates prehistory in it,
fjords
are wicks,
what’s recounted on an empty stomach
dreams,
you touch it, a day-
conspirator.
* * *
OPEN GLOTTIS, airstream,
the
vowel, effective,
with the one
formant,
consonant-thrusts, filtered
by clarity clear
from afar,
protection shield: consciousness
uncathectable
I and you too,
overtruth-
ed
the eye-,
the memory-greedy rolling
commodity
sign,
the temporal lobe intact,
like the visionstem.
* * *
FROM THE MOORFLOOR to
climb into the sans-image,
a hemo
in the gun barrel hope,
the aim, like impatience, of age,
in it.
Village air, rue Tournefort.
* * *
HIGHMOOR, watch-glass-
shaped (someone has time),
so many knights, sundewaddicted,
from the
lagg
the Sabbath candles rise up,
swingmoor, when you peatify,
I’ll unhand
the Just One.
* * *
OREGLITTER, deep in
turmoil, urfathers.
You help yourself
thus,
as if
angiosperms spoke
a clear word,
with them.
Chalktrace trombone.
In the karst depression
the lost finds
sparseness, clarity.
* * *
EINKANTER: Rembrandt
on easy terms with the lightcut,
sunned off the star
as beardlock, templish,
handlines cross the forehead,
in the desertshifts, on
the pedestal boulders
around your right
commissure shimmers
the sixteenth psalm.
* * *
WITH PRUNING HOOKS, at
prayer’s tidal range,
to splice all topsails,
afighting, standing, behind
the eyelash, in oilskin,
anointed by showers,
to tie the calmbelt
around your joke-spike, dinghy
world.
* * *
LOESSDOLLS: thus,
here it doesn’t petrify,
only landsnailshells,
not blown empty,
say to the desert: you
are inhabited—:
the wild horses blow
into mammouth-
horns:
Petrarch
is in sight
again.
* * *
V
STEELUGINOUS VISIONSTONE, bestarred,
this here:
The palm ferns, now,
in Castrup: a
metallic vanguard troop
of the next
ur-century,
a flightskin, big-lipped,
you
push through it,
the image-addicted, blank
escalator
cannot mirror you.
* * *
AND STRENGTH AND PAIN
and what rammed me
and pushed and held:
jubilee-leap-
years,
spruceroar, once,
your typhus, Tanja,
the wilding conviction
that this is to be said differently than
so.
* * *
RAISED TOGETHER
by the noises,
you push—glass
agresses, what is ever
more impenetrably yours—,
you push everything
into his aura,
the quantum courage
bitters itself in,
watchful:
it knows that you know.
* * *
FALLING ROCKS behind the beetles.
There I saw one, he didn’t lie,
home-standing into his desperation.
As the solitude-storm did for you
so does wide-striding silence
succeed for him.
* * *
I STRIDE ACROSS your treason,
anklets clasping
all Being-
articulations,
crumghosts
calf
from your glass-
tits,
my stone came to you,
selfdebarred, you otter-
cargoed,
inside
you hurt yourself
lifting my lightest pain,
you become visible,
a, any, dead one, all for himself,
changes tack.
* * *
LIGHTRODS, whose
conversation,
on traffic islands,
with armory-delights finally
given leave,
meanings
straddle the ripped-up pavement,
the chick
Time, putt, putt, putt,
slips into the octopus-nerve,
for treatment,
a tentacle grabs
the jutebag full of
decision marbles from the
ballocks-ZK,
up and down the dunggutter
comes the evidence.
* * *
ONE READING BRANCH, one,
feeding the forehead skin,
one light source, sleepily
swallowed by you,
passes the hungry
host-tissue,
visual aid, striated,
over moon scouring
backscatter-probes. On a large: on a small scale.
Earths, still and always, earths.
Cornea-covered
basalt,
rocket-kissed:
cosmic
circulation-gawking, and yet:
landlocked horizons.
Terrestrial, terrestrial.
One reading branch, one,
feeding the forehead skin—as if you wrote
poems—,
it comes to the postcard greeting,
back then, before
the bloodclotplace, on the lung-
threshold, yearward, from Pilsen,
yearover,
ensavaged from so much
pressed into muteness:
Bon vent, bonne mer,
a flickering
brainlobe, a
seapiece,
there, where you live,
its capital, the un-
occupiable.
* * *
TEAR YOUR dream from the launchpad,
pack your shoe into it,
mezery-eyed one, come,
lace it up.
* * *
CHALK-CROCUS, in
the clearing: your
wanted-poster-ripened
from-there-and-from-there-too,
unsplittable,
Explosives
smile at you,
the Dasein Dent
helps a flake
get out of itself,
in the treasure troves
the Moldau collects itself.
* * *
THE CABLES ARE already laid
to the happiness behind you
and to its
munitioned
attack lines,
in the decongestion
cities
turned toward you,
where they vaporize health agents,
melodious
antitoxins
announce the racedriversprint
through your conscience.
* * *
IN THE ACCESS HATCHES to truth
the detectors pray,
soon the walls come flying
to the negotiation tables,
the emblems palaver
away the blood,
a crow sets
its half-faced
radar-wing to
halfmast.
* * *
AND NOW, in a major strategic
situation, claw-
signed
conviction-tinsel,
a wordbraid, red-
lined,
sews itself to the mouths
all-baroque in the
wound-
silenced
commissure.
Breadmildewclarity
gives offense,
exhausted
ideas, what else,
set themslves against.
* * *
RAPIDFIRE-PERIHELION.
Break in your dustmote,
you have to come along,
warns the flyer.
(You, acosmic, as I.)
A knödel’s satellites, keen,
on the ghost-pawlatschen.
* * *
WE THE OVERDEEPENED, aloned
in the permafrost.
Every hanging valley carts a lid
toward the eye imprint
and its rock-
kernel.
* * *
BEHIND THE TEMPLESPLINTERS,
in the needfresh
woodwine,
(the place you come from,
it talks itself dark, southward),
dahliascared near gold,
on always cheerier
chairs.
* * *
RESCUE of all
wastewater gurglings
in the poststamp-toad-
call. Cor-
respondence.
Euphorized
slowmotion choirs of cerebrized
future saurians
heat a selfheart.
Its
rejection, I winter
over to you.
* * *
THE DARKENED splinterecho,
brainstream-
ward,
the portcullis over the meander
on which it comes to stand,
so much
unwindowed there,
just look,
the truss
of lazy fervor,
one
gunbutt blow from
the prayersilos,
one and not one.
* * *
ETERNITY stays within limits:
lightly, in its
powerful measure-tentacles,
deliberately,
the bloodsugar-pea, x-rayable
by fingernails,
rotates.
Timestead
I
Nomadforb, you catch yourself
one of the speeches,
the foresworn aster
joins up,
should someone who
shattered the songs
speak to the rod now,
his and everyone’s
blinding
wouldn’t happen.
* * *
Spiteful moons
sprawl and slobber
behind Nothingness,
com-
petent hope, the half of it,
switches itself off,
bluelight now, bluetight,
in bags,
misery, flambéed
in hard troughs,
a throwstone-game
saves the foreheads,
you roll the altars
timeinward.
* * *
GOLD, that extends
the nubian back of a hand—the way,
then the footpath toward you, on
over the stone, the beveled one,
fro
m dreamwithdrawal-times,
two sand clods, windblown,
stand with me,
starinfested a moor wraps itself
around one of the pines,
the choir
of plane-tree trunks
kowtows ready for the prayer
against prayer,
from sealed driftwood
I build names for you, which
you peg close to the rainschemes,
the warcrickets shall come,
out of my beard,
in front of the thoughtgills already stands
the tear.
* * *
FROM THE SINKING WHALE FOREHEAD
I read you off—
you recognize me,
heaven
throws itself
on the harpoon,
sixlegged our star
hunkers down in the foam,
slowly
someone who sees it raises
the consolation morsel:
copulating Nothingness.