Free Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan Page A

that to the image,
    which casts us home into
    the dice-cup, where I lie by you,
    unplayable.
    Â 
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    W HEN YOU LIE
    in the bed of missing bunting,
    by blueblack syllables, in
    the shadow of snowlashes,
    through thought-showers the steely
    crane comes swimming—
    you open yourself to him.
    His bill ticks you the hour
    into each mouth—in each
    chimes, with bloodred bell-rope, a silence-
    millennium,
    the hour and the reprieve
    coin each other to death,
    the taler, the groschen
    rain hard through your pores
    in
    the shape of a second
    you fly there and barricade
    the doors Yesterday and Tomorrow,—phosphorous
    like eternity-teeth,
    buds your one, then your other
    breast,
    toward the grips, under
    the strokes—: so tightly,
    so deeply
    sown
    is the starry
    crane-
    seed.
    Â 
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    B EHIND COALMARKED sleep
    â€”our cottage is known—
    where our dreamcrest swelled, fiery, despite all,
    and I drove the goldnails into our
    coffin-beautiful morning
    swimming alongside,
    there the rods dipped royally before our eye,
    water came, water,
    savagely
    the skiffs bit through the grand-second memory,
    the mud-muzzled beasts drifted around us
    â€”that much
    no heaven caught yet—,
    what a weir, torn one,
    you were, once again!—, the beasts, the beasts, adrift,
    salthorizons
    were building on our glances, a mountain grew
    far outward into the ravine,
    where my world summoned
    yours, forever.
    Â 
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    Â 
    IN PRAGUE
    Half-death,
    suckled on our life,
    lay ash-image-true around us—
    we too
    kept on drinking, soul-crossed, two swords,
    stitched to heavenstones, born of wordblood,
    in the nightbed,
    larger and larger
    we grew, intergrafted, there was
    no name left for
    what urged us on (one of thirty-
    and-how-many
    was my living shadow,
    who climbed up the delusion-stairs to you?),
    a tower,
    the half-one built into the Whither,
    a Hradčany
    all of goldmaker’s No,
    bone-Hebrew,
    ground to sperm,
    ran through the hourglass,
    through which we swam, two dreams now, tolling
    against time, on the squares.
    Â 
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    Â 
    S TARTING FROM THE ORCHIS —
    go, count
    the shadows of the steps up to it
    behind the five-mountain childhood—,
    from it, I win
    the half-word for twelfth-night, from it
    comes my hand to grab you
    forever.
    A little doom, as big
    as the heartdot I set
    behind your my name
    stammering eye,
    is helpful to me.
    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 You also come,
    as if over meadows,
    and bring along the image of a quaywall,
    there—when
    our keys, deep in the refused,
    crossed each other heraldically—
    strangers play dice with what
    we both still own
    of language,
    of destiny.
    Â 
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    Â 
    H ALFGNAWED , mask-
    miened corbel stone,
    deep
    in the eyeslit-crypt:
    Inward, upward
    into skull’s inside,
    where you break up heaven, again and again,
    into furrow and convolution
    he plants his image,
    which outgrows, outgrows itself.
    Â 
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    Â 
    F ROM FISTS , white
    from the truth hammered
    free of the wordwall,
    a new brain blooms for you.
    Beautiful, to be veiled by nothing,
    it casts them, the
    thoughtshadows.
    Therein, immovable,
    fold up, even today,
    twelve mountains, twelve foreheads.
    Vagabond Melancholy, also star-
    eyed by way of you,
    hears of it.
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    B ULLROARERS whizz into the light, truth
    sends word.
    Yonder, the shore’s
    slope swells toward us,
    a dark
    thousand-brightness—the
    ressurected houses!—
    sings.
    An icethorn—we too
    had called—
    gathers the tones.
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    Â 
    E VENING , in
    Hamburg, an
    endless shoelace—at
    which
    the ghosts gnaw—
    binds two bloody toes together
    for the road’s oath.
    Â 
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    Â 
    A T THE ASSEMBLED
    signs, in the
    wordmembraned oiltent, at the outlet
    of time,
    groaned into brightness
    soundlessly
    â€”you, royal air, nailed
    to the plague-cross, now
    you