Breathturn into Timestead (11 page)

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

                              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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

E
VENING
, in

Hamburg, an

endless shoelace—at

which

the ghosts gnaw—

binds two bloody toes together

for the road's oath.

 

 

A
T THE ASSEMBLED

signs, in the

wordmembraned oiltent, at the outlet

of time,

groaned into brightness

soundlessly

—you, royal air, nailed

to the plague-cross, now

you bloom—,

pore-eyed,

pain-scaly, on

horseback.

 

 

T
HE UPWARD-STANDING COUNTRY
,

cracked,

with the flightroot, to which

stonebreath accrues.

Here also

the seas rush in, out of the steep ravine,

and your speech-

pocked, panic

heretic

cruises.

 

 

T
HE PUSHED-AROUND

ever-light, loam yellow,

behind

planetheads.

Invented

looks, see-

scars,

carved into the spaceship,

beg for earth-

mouths.

 

 

A
SHGLORY
behind

your shaken-knotted

hands at the threeway.

Pontic erstwhile: here,

a drop,

on

the drowned rudder blade,

deep

in the petrified oath,

it roars up.

(On the vertical

breathrope, in those days,

higher than above,

between two painknots, while

the glossy

Tatarmoon climbed up to us,

I dug myself into you and into you.)

Ash-

glory behind

you threeway

hands.

The cast-in-front-of-you, from

the East, terrible.

No one

bears witness for the

witness.

 

 

IV

T
HE WRITTEN
hollows itself, the

spoken, seagreen,

burns in the bays,

in the

liquified names

the dolphins dart,

in the eternalized Nowhere, here,

in the memory of the over-

loud bells in—where only?,

who

pants

in this

shadow-quadrat, who

from beneath it

shimmers, shimmers, shimmers?

 

 

C
ELLO-ENTRY

from behind pain:

The powers, escheloned

as the counterheavens,

roll inexplicables before

approach lane and arrival,

the

scaled evening

stands full of lungbranches,

two

blaze-clouds of breath

dig in the book

which the temple-din opened,

something comes true,

twelve times glows

the arrow-riddled yonder,

she, black-

biled, drinks

the blackbiled's seed,

all is less, than

it is,

all is more.

 

 

FRIHED

In the house of the doubled delusion,

where the stone boats fly

over

Whiteking's pier, toward the secrets,

where finally with

cut cord the

man-of-war-word cruises,

I, reed-pith nourished, am

in you, on

wild ducks' ponds,

I sing—

what do I sing?

The saboteur's

coat

with the red, with the white

circles around the

bullet

holes

—through them

you sight the with us driving

free-

starry Above—

covers us now,

the verdigris-nobility from the quay,

with its burned-brick thoughts

round about the forehead,

heaps the spirit round, the spindrift,

quick

the noises wither

this side and that side of mourning,

the crown's

closer-

sailing pus-prong

in the eye of one

born crooked

writes poems

in Danish.

 

 

T
HE SILICIFIED SAYING
in the fist,

you forget that you forget,

blinking, the punctuation marks

crystallize at the wrist,

through the earth

cleft to the crest

the pauses come riding,

there, by

the sacrifice-bush,

where memory catches fire,

the One Breath

seizes you.

 

 

W
HERE
?

In night's friable matter.

In grief-debris and -drift,

in slowest uproar,

in the wisdom-shaft Never.

Waterneedles

sew the burst

shadow together—it fights its way

deeper down,

free.

 

 

K
ING'S RAGE
, stonemaned, up front.

And the prayers,

gone up in smoke—

stallions, pain-

accrued, the

untamable-obedient

irregulars:

psalm-hoofed, singing across

open-, open-, open-

leafed Biblemountains,

toward the clear, also

clattering,

mighty seagerms.

 

 

SOLVE

De-easterned tomb-

tree, split into

firebrands:

past the Poison-

Palatinates, past the cathedrals,

upstream, down-

stream rafted

by the tiny-flaring, by the

free

punctuation mark of the

script salvaged and dis-

solved into the count-

less to-be-

named un-

pronounceable

names.

 

 

COAGULA

Your wound

too, Rosa.

And the hornslight of your

Romanian buffaloes

in star's stead above the

sandbed, in the

talking, red-

ember-mighty

alembic.

 

 

S
KULLTHINKING
, dumb, on the arrowtrace.

Your song of

song, into the hard

February-spark clamped,

half-shattered

jaw.

The one, still

to be traveled mile

Melancholy.

Ambushed now by the achieved, aimblue,

upright in the skiff,

also from the gnashing crag-

blessings released.

 

 

E
ASTERSMOKE
, flooding, with

the letterlike

keeltrack amidst.

(Never was heaven.

But sea still is, fire red,

sea.)

We here, we,

glad for the passage, before the tent,

where you baked desertbread

from wandered-along language.

At the farthest sight-edge: the dance

of two blades across the

heartshadowcord.

The net underneath, knotted

from thought-

ends—at what

depth?

There: the bitten through

eternity-penny, spat

up to us through the meshes.

Three sandvoices, three

scorpions:

the guest-people, with us

in the skiff.

 

 

Q
UAYWALL-REST
, astride,

in the shadow of the

trumps fanned open

from above—

your

worn-out

hands, coarser than ever,

reach elsewhere.

The scooping, again

and again

slopping over, to be

spilled, cup full of bile.

The slightly

hither-bent,

upstream-steered

wander-vessels, passing

hard by your kneescab.

Ashlar, ride.

Grayfaith next to me,

drink

up.

 

 

A
NSWERED

by the transferred sparks

the fire-fragrance around

the pricket.

All

orbits are free.

Several earths

I lob to you while going blind—

the two

white ones you keep, one

in each hand.

The un-

buried, uncounted, up there,

the children,

are ready to jump—

You,

source-nightly, I

did not resemble:

you, joyous as

you now hover, are

impaled by the invisible, second,

standing firebrand.

 

 

S
IGHT THREADS, SENSE THREADS
, from

nightbile knitted

behind time:

who

is invisible enough

to see you?

Mantle-eye, almondeye, you came

through all the walls,

climb

on this pulpit,

roll, what lies there, up again—

Ten blindstaffs,

fiery, straight, free,

float from the just

born sign,

stand

above it.

It is still us.

 

 

A
ROAR
: it is

truth itself

stepped among

mankind,

right into the

metaphor-flurry.

 

 

L
UNATIC-BOWLS
, rotten

depths.

Were I— —

Well, yes, were I

the—whither bent?—

ashtree outside,

I would know how to accompany you,

shining graydish with the

quickly-to-be-gulped

down image, marbling you,

and the tightly

drawn, flickering

thought-circle around you

both.

 

 

L
ICHTENBERG'S TWELVE
with the tablecloth

inherited napkins—a

planet-greeting to

the language-towers everywhere

in the to-be-silenced-to-death sign-

zone.

Being

—no heaven is, no

earth, and the

memory of both extinguished

but for the one

ashtree-believing nuthatch—,

his

from the city-ramparts gathered

white comet.

A voice-rift, to

preserve him, in

the universe.

The redlorn of a

thought-

thread. The bur-

geoned laments

about it, the lament

below it—whose

sound?

With it—don't ask

where—

I nearly—

don't say where, when, again.

 

 

GIVE THE WORD

Cut to the brains—half? three quarters?—,

you give, benighted, the passwords—these: