Read Online Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan - Free Book Online Page B

towrope’s vulturegrip.
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    T WENTY FOREVER
    evaporated Schlüsselburg-primroses
    in your swimming left
    fist.
    Into the fish-
    scale etched:
    the lines of the hand
    from which they grew.
    Heaven- and earth-
    acid flowed together.
    The time-
    reckoning worked out, without remainder. Cruising
    â€”for your, quick melancholy, sake—
    scale and fist.
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    N O SANDART ANYMORE , no sandbook, no masters.
    Nothing in the dice. How
    many mutes?
    Seventen.
    Your question—your answer.
    Your chant, what does it know?
    Deepinsnow,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Eepinno,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I—i—o.
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    B RIGHTNESSHUNGER —with it
    I walked up the bread-
    step, under
    the blindness-
    bell:
    it, water-
    clear,
    claps itself over
    the freedom that climbed with
    me, that misclimbed
    too high, on which
    one of the heavens gorged itself,
    that I let vault above
    the worddrenched
    image orbit, blood orbit.
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    W HEN WHITENESS ASSAILED US , at night;
    when from the libation-ewer more
    than water came;
    when the skinned knee
    gave the sacrificebell the nod:
    Fly!—
    Then
    I still
    was whole.
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    H OLLOW LIFEHOMESTEAD . In the windtrap
    the lung
    blown empty
    flowers. A handful
    sleepcorn
    drifts from the mouth
    stammered true
    out toward the snow-
    conversations.
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    O VER THREE in sea-
    drunken sleep
    with brownalgae-blood
    ciphered breast-
    nipplestones
    clap your
    from the last
    raincord breaking
    loose sky.
    And let
    your freshwatermussel that rode
    with you to this place
    lap all that
    up, before
    you hold her to the ear
    of a clock’s shadow,
    evenings.
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    O N THE WHITE PHILACTERY —the
    Lord of this hour
    was
    a wintercreature, for his
    sake
    happened what happened—
    my climbing mouth bit in, once more,
    when it looked for you, smoketrace
    you, up there,
    in woman’s shape,
    you on the journey to my
    firethoughts in the blackgravel
    beyond the cleftwords, through
    which I saw you walk, high-
    legged and
    the heavylipped own
    head
    on the by my
    deadly accurate
    hands
    living body.
    Tell your fingers
    accompanying you far in-
    side the crevasses, how
    I knew you, how far
    I pushed you into the deep,
    where my most bitter dream
    slept with you heart-fro, in the bed
    of my inextinguishable name.
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    G O BLIND today already:
    eternity too is full of eyes—
    wherein
    drowns, what helped the images
    over the path they came,
    wherein
    expires, what took you too out of
    language with a gesture
    that you let happen like
    the dance of two words of just
    autumn and silk and nothingness.
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    L ATEWOODDAY under
    netnerved skyleaf. Through
    bigcelled idlehours clambers, in rain,
    the blackblue, the
    thoughtbeetle.
    Animal-bloodsoming words
    crowd before its feelers.
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    T ODAY :
    nightthings, again, fire whipped.
    Glowing
    naked-plants-dance.
    (Yesterday:
    above the rowing names
    floated faithfulness;
    chalk went around writing;
    open it laid and greeted:
    the turned-to-water book.)
    The owl-pebble raffled—
    from the sleep-cornice
    he looks down
    upon the five-eye, to whom you devolved.
    Otherwise?
    Half- and quarter-
    allies on
    the side of the beaten. Riches of
    lost-soured
    language.
    When they impale
    the last shadow,
    you burn the vowing hand free.
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    M IDDAY , with
    seconds’ flurry,
    in the roundgraveshadow, into my
    chambered pain
    â€”with you, hither-
    silenced, I lived
    two days in Rome
    on ocher and red—
    you come, I already lie there,
    gliding light through the doors, horizontal—:
    the arms holding you become visible, only they. That much
    secrecy
    I still summoned, in spite of all.
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    S OWN UNDER the skin