Read Breathturn into Timestead Online
Authors: Paul Celan
“Tatararrows.”
                        “Artpap.”
                                        “Breath.”
All are coming, no one's missing.
(Siphets and probyls are among them.)
A man comes.
Worldapplesize, the teardrop beside you,
swept through, crossed
by answer,
                    answer,
                                  answer.
Iced-throughâby whom?
“Pass,” you say,
                           “pass,”
                                        “pass.”
The quiet lepra peels off your palate
and fans light to your tongue,
                                                    light.
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F
ROM BEHOLDING THE BLACKBIRDS
, evenings,
through the unbarred, that
surrounds me,
I promised myself weapons.
From beholding the weaponsâhands,
from beholding the handsâthe long ago
by the sharp, flat
pebble written line
âWave, you
carried it hither, honed it,
gave yourself, un-
losable, up,
shoresand, you take,
take in,
sea oats, blow
yours alongâ,
the line, the line,
through which we swim, entwined,
twice each millennium,
all that singing at the fingers,
that even the through us living,
magnificent-unexplainable
flood does not believe us.
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with the
outward- and away-
burrowing black-constellation swarm:
into the silicified forehead of a ram
I burn this image, between
the horns, therein,
in the singing of the coils, the
marrow of the curdled
heartseas swells.
What
doesn't he
butt against?
The world is gone, I have to carry you.
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S
LATE-EYED ONE
, reached
by the striding counterscript the
day after the blinding.
Readable bloodclot-messenger,
hither-died, despite all,
carried by knowing barbedwire-wings
over the undisplaceable
thousand-wall.
You here, you: quickened
by the breath of the
names
caught in the free-
shoveled lungbranches.
To-
be-deciphered you.
With you,
on the vocalcords' bridge, in the
great Inbetween,
nightover.
Shot at with hearttones,
from all the world-pulpits.
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O
OZY
, then
weedy silence of the shores.
The one sluice yet. At
the warttower, doused
with brackish,
you empty into.
Before you, in
the rowing giant sporangia,
as if words panted there, a
luster sickles.
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Y
OU, THE
hair taken from
the lip with the bright-
seeing highsleep:
threaded through the goldeye
of the sung-aright ash-
needle.
You, the knot torn out
of the throat with
the One Light:
run through by needle and hair,
under way, under way.
Your reversals, incessantly, round
the seven-
fingered kisshand behind
happiness.
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firefissure through the world.
The Who's there?âcalls
inside it:
mirror-cast through you here
onto the shield
of the Eternal Bug,
sniffed around by False and Bewildered,
looping the unending loop, nevertheless,
which stays navigable for the un-
towed answer.
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V
APORBAND-, BANDEROLE-UPRISING
,
redder than red,
during the great
frost-thrusts, on
sliding ice-bucklings, before
seal nations.
The beam hammered all
the way through you,
that writes here,
redder than red.
With its words
to shuck you out of the brainshell, here,
hastily buried October.
With you to coin the gold, now,
when it dies out of.
With you to assist the banderoles.
With you to moor the glasshard leaflet
to the blood-bollard, that
the earth pushed out
through this step-pole.
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blubbered out, lulled.
The round, small, the firm:
from the gazeniches it comes
rolling, nearby,
into no kind of cloth.
(It has
âPearl, it was
so difficult through youâ,
it has, diving, won the saltbush,
over there, in the Twosea.)
Without light it rolls, without
colorâyou,
stick the ivory needle through it
âwho doesn't know
that the tigered stone, that jumped you,
rang out on it?â,
and soâwhither fell earth?â
let it turn time-up,
with ten nailmoons on the towrope,
in serpent-nearness, at yellow-flood,
quasistellar.
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O
NCE
,
I did hear him,
he did wash the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and unending,
annihilated,
I'ed.
Light was. Salvation.
E
YE-GLANCES
, whose winks,
no brightness sleeps.
Undebecome, everywhere,
gather yourself,
stand.
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Blind, light-
bearded partition.
A cockchaferdream
floodlights it.
Behind it, complaint-rastered,
Freud's forehead opens up,
the tear, hard-
silenced outside,
links on with the sentence:
“For the last
time psycho-
logy.”
The imitation
jackdaw
breakfasts.
The glottal stop
sings.
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C
HANCE, MARKED
âthe signs, unscattered,
the number, multiplied, unjustly flowered around,
the Lord someone fugitive-close, raining, who looks,
as lies seven-
                        blaze, knives
                                                 flatter, crutches
perjure themselves, U-
under
            this
                      world
the ninth already burrows,
                                                lion,
you sing the humansong
of tooth and soul, both
hardnesses.
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Thronged by colors, life, harried by numbers.
The watch
steals its time from the comet,
the swords
fish,
the name
gilds the ruses,
the touch-me-not, helmeted,
ciphers the periods in the stone.
Pain, as slugshadow.
I hear, it won't become later.
Fay and false, in the saddle,
gauge this here too.
Globelamps instead of yours.
Lighttraps, border-idolatrish, instead
of our houses.
The black-diaphanous
juggler jaws
in lower
culmination.
The hard-won umlaut in the unword:
your reflection: the tombshield
of one of the wordshadows
here.
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T
HE TRACE OF A BITE
in the nowhere.
It too
you have to fight,
from here on out.
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I
N THE ETERNAL DEPTH
: the brick-
mouths
rave.
You blow up a prayer
before each.
Letterfaithful, on the emergency trail,
stand Up and Down,
the krater full of bubbly
brain.
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V
ISIBLE
, by brainstem and heartstem,
undarkened, terrestrial,
the midnight marksman, mornings,
chases the twelvesong through
the marrow of treason and putrefaction.
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MAPS
, phosphorous,
far behind Here by sheer
ring-fingers beaten.
Travelluck, look:
The tripdart, two
inches from the target,
topples
into the aorta.
The shared goods, ten
hundredweight
folie à deux,
wake up
in the vultureshadow,
in the seventeenth liver, at the foot
of the stuttering
information mast.
Before it,
in the slated watershield, the
three standing whales
head the ball.
A right eye
flashes.
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S
ACKCLOTH-MOLD
, tower-high.
Eye slot
for the destarred
at the end of the grief-fibril.
The eyelash-seam, at a slant
to the god-blazes.
In the mouthbay the place
for the rowing
Kaisertwitter.
The. And the Going-with-
him across smokeblue,
blank
tableland, you.
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S
PASMS
, I love you, psalms,
the feeling-walls deep in the you-ravine
rejoice, seedpainted one,
Eternal, de-eternalized you are
eternalized, Uneternal, you,
hey,
into you, into you
I sing the bone-rod-incisions
Redred, far behind the pubic hair
harped, in the caves,
outside, all around
the unending none-whatsoever-canon,
you throw me the nine times
twined, dripping
eyetooth-circlet.
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the
asunder-burned,
to go on rocking you, in the fly-
ing heartshadow, you.
Where?
Arrange the place, arrange the word.
Extinguish. Measure.
Ash-brightness, ash-ellâswal-
lowed.
Mismeasure, unmeasure, misplaced, unworded,
unwo
ash-
hiccup, your eyes
in the arm,
always.
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The orange pepperwort,
stick it behind your forehead,
silence the barb out of the wire,
with which she flatters, even now,
listen to it,
for the span of an impatience.
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The immortality cypher, by Henry
the Fourth rocked in
to tortoise-nobility,
sneers eleatically
behind itself.
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In the corner of
your eyes, stranger,
the Albigenses-shadowâ
after
the Waterloo-Plein,
toward the orphaned
raffia shoe, toward
the also bartered Amen,
into the eternal
housegap I
sing you:
so that Baruch, he who never
weeps,
may grind aright
all around you the
angular,
ununderstood, seeing
tear.
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T
HE STALLION
with the flowering wick,
levitating, at pass-
height,
comet brilliance on
the rump.
You, in the con-
spirationary torrents un-
locked, the
bouncing breasts in the sharp
verse-fibula-yoke,
fall with me through
images, rocks, numbers.
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T
HE OUNCE OF TRUTH
deep inside delusion,
past it
the trays of the balance
roll,
both together, in conversation,
the law, raised in struggle to heart-
level,
son, wins.
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I
N THE NOISES
, like our beginning,
in the ravine,
where you fell to me,
I wind it up again, the
musical boxâyou
know: the invisible,
the
inaudible one.
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The iron spike, reared,
in the brickniche:
the co-millennium
instranges itself, unconquerable,
follows
your driving eyes,
now,
with glances cast here by dice
you wake, who is beside you,
she becomes heavier,
heavier,
you too, with all
the instrangedness in you,
instrange yourself,
deeper,
the One
string
tenses its pain between you,
the missing target