Breathturn into Timestead

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,