Breathturn into Timestead

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Breathturn into Timestead Page 15

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.

 

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