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Breathturn into Timestead

The Collected Later Poetry A Bilingual Edition

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    You may confidently
    serve me snow:
    as often as shoulder to shoulder
    with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,
    its youngest leaf
    shrieked.


    By the undreamt etched,
    the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland
    casts up the life mountain.

    From its crumb
    you knead anew our names,
    which I, an eye
    similar
    to yours on each finger,
    probe for
    a place, through which I
    can wake myself toward you,
    the bright
    hungercandle in mouth.


    Into the furrows
    of the heavenscoin in the doorcrack
    you press the word
    from which I rolled,
    when I with trembling fists
    the roof over us
    dismantled, slate for slate,
    syllable for syllable, for the copper-
    glimmer of the begging-
    cup's sake up
    there.


    In the rivers north of the future
    I cast the net, which you
    hesitantly weight
    with shadows stones
    wrote.


    Before your late face,
    a loner
    wandering between
    nights that change me too,
    something came to stand,
    which was with us once already, un-
    touched by thoughts.


    Down melancholy's rapids
    past the blank
    woundmirror:
    There the forty
    stripped lifetrees are rafted.

    Single counter-
    swimmer, you
    count them, touch them
    all.


    The numbers, in league
    with the images' doom
    and counter-
    doom.

    The clapped-on
    skull, at whose
    sleepless temple a will-
    of-the-wisping hammer
    celebrates all that in
    worldbeat.


    Paths in the shadow-break
    of your hand.

    From the four-finger-furrow
    I root up the
    petrified blessing
.

    Whitegray of
    shafted, steep
    feeling.

    Landinward, hither
    drifted sea oats blow
    sand patterns over
    the smoke of wellchants.
    An ear, severed, listens.

    An eye, cut in strips,
    does justice to all this.


    With masts sung earthward
    the sky-wrecks drive.

    Onto this woodsong
    you hold fast with your teeth.

    You are the songfast
    pennant.


    Templeclamps,
    eyed by your malar bone.
    Its silverglare there
    where they gripped:
    you and the rest of your sleep—
    soon
    will be your birthday.


    Next to the hailstone, in
    the mildewed corn-
    cob, home,
    to the late, the hard
    November stars obedient:

    In the heartthread, the
    knit of worm-talk—:

    a bowstring, from which
    your arrowscript whirrs,
    archer.


    To stand, in the shadow
    of the stigma in the air.

    Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
    Unrecognized,
    for you
    alone.

    With all that has room in it,
    even without
    language.


    Your dream, butting from the watch.
    With the wordspoor carved
    twelve times
    helically into its
    horn.

    The last butt it delivers.

    In the ver-
    tical narrow
    daygorge, the upward
    poling ferry:

    it carries
    sore readings over.


    With the persecuted in late, un-
    silenced,
    radiating
    league.

    The morning-plumb, gilded,
    hafts itself to your co-
    swearing, co-
    scratching, co-
    writing
    heel.


    Threadsuns
    above the grayblack wastes.
    A tree-
    high thought
    grasps the light-tone: there are
    still songs to sing beyond
    mankind.


    In the serpentcoach, past
    the white cypress,
    through the flood
    they drove you.

    But in you, from
    birth,
    foamed the other spring,
    up the black
    ray memory
    you climbed to the day.


    Slickensides, fold-axes,
    rechanneling-
    points:
    your terrain.

    On both poles
    of the cleftrose, legible:
    your outlawed word.
    Northtrue. Southbright.


    Wordaccretion, volcanic,
    drowned out by searoar.

    Above,
    the flooding mob
    of the contra-creatures: it
    flew a flag—portrait and replica
    cruise vainly timeward.

    Till you hurl forth the word-
    moon, out of which
    the wonder ebb occurs
    and the heart-
    shaped crater
    testifies naked for the beginnings,
    the kings-
    births.


    (i know you, you are the deeply bowed,
    I, the transpierced, am subject to you.
    Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
    You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)


    Eroded by
    the beamwind of your speech
    the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
    experienced—the hundred-
    tongued perjury-
    poem, the noem.

    Evorsion-
    ed,
    free
    the path through the men-
    shaped snow,
    the penitent's snow, to
    the hospitable
    glacier-parlors and -tables.

    Deep
    in the timecrevasse,
    in the
    honeycomb-ice
    waits, a breathcrystal,
    your unalterable
    testimony.

    By the great
    Eye-
    less
    scooped from your eyes:

    the six-
    edged, denialwhite
    erratic.

    A blind man's hand, it also starhard
    from name-wandering,
    rests on him, as
    long as on you,
    Esther.


    Singable remnant—the outline
    of him, who through
    the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,
    apart, at the snowplace.

    Whirling
    under comet-
    brows
    the gaze's bulk, toward
    which the eclipsed, tiny
    heart-satellite drifts
    with the
    spark caught outside.

    —Disenfranchised lip, announce,
    that something happens, still,
    not far from you.


    Flowing, big-
    celled sleepingden.

    Each
    partition traveled
    by graysquadrons.

    The letters are breaking formation,
    the last
    dreamproof skiffs—
    each with
    part of the still
    to be sunken sign
    in
    the towrope's vulturegrip.


    Twenty 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
    —for your, quick melancholy, sake—
    scale and fist.


    No 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,
    Eepinno,
    I—i—o.


    Brightnesshunger—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.


    When 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.


    Hollow lifehomestead. In the windtrap
    the lung
    blown empty
    flowers. A handful
    sleepcorn
    drifts from the mouth
    stammered true
    out toward the snow-
    conversations.


    Over 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.


    On 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.


    Go 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.


    Latewoodday under
    netnerved skyleaf. Through
    bigcelled idlehours clambers, in rain,
    the blackblue, the
    thoughtbeetle.

    Animal-bloodsoming words
    crowd before its feelers.

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Excerpted from Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan, Pierre Joris. Copyright © 2003 Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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