Read Breathturn into Timestead Online
Authors: Paul Celan
Who now works the bellows of the peatorgan, one-
legged, will
win a strongstream
loss.
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unveiled alder swears
under its breath,
on earth's back, wide as a hand,
crouches the shot-through
lung,
at the field's boundary the
winghour picks the snowcorn
from its own stone-eye,
lightbands set me afire,
crown-damages flicker.
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M
E TOO
, who am born like you, no hand holds,
and none throws me a happiness into the hour, no different from you,
dipped like I into bull's blood,
yet the numbers stand ready to light the tear,
leaping into the world
from our navel,
yet what came near us, singly,
enters the great syllable-script,
and the almond-testicle
thunders
and blooms.
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names, all,
the outmost, whinnied
into kinghood
before hoarfrost-mirrors,
beleaguered, besieged
by multiple births,
the merlon-cleft through it,
which means you, isolato,
also.
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nothingmirrored,
the cosmetics, truth, frozen blue
in the angle-mouth,
frostpollen powder on the blank superskull,
round about the thin questionlock Black,
the brows, the brows: growing,
two giant feelercombs, two
âyou, tall-streaked,
large-felt roughnight Alwaysalwaysâ,
already swung away from the flake world,
not to, not fro.
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R
OADBLOCKBUOY LANGUAGE
, roadblockbuoy song.
The steamroller thrumps
the second
Iliad
into the torn-up
pavement,
sandseamed
the old images
surprise themselves, into the gutter,
the warriors bleed to death oily
in silver puddles, on the road-
side, thudding,
Troy, dust-crowned,
gets it.
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the flood, past
raised black
sacrifice stones,
unendingly earthed melancholy
in the
undercarriage shafts,
drunken flightwriters on
the yearning-slope,
future found objects, silvery,
in
the cockpit's skullery,
sight tunnels, blown
into the speechfog,
self-sparkflowers
on all cables,
in the great, unextended
rimring your
hubbed shadow,
Saturn.
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D
ELUSIONSTALKER EYES
: in you
end up the rest of the gazes.
A single
flood
swills up.
Soon you brighten
the rock to death, on which they
have
bet, against
themselves.
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I bite myself into you, I silence myself at you,
we resound,
alone,
the pastose
eternity-chimes drip away,
squawked through
by today's
yesterday,
we drive,
grandly
does the last soundbell
take us in:
the accelerated heartstep
outside
in space,
near her, the earth-
axis.
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besnowed, oversnowed:
in the calendargap
he's cradled, he's cradled
by the newborn
nothing.
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S
TREW OCHER
into my eyes:
you no longer
live there,
save
on the tomb-
furnishings, save,
pace off the stonerows,
on your hands,
with their dream
paint over the
stamped-out
temporal bone's squama,
at the
great
bifurcation re-
count yourself to the ocher
three times, nine times.
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Â
grebe-
threat,
the icelashed with
kraken-
arms,
you, clawed
Yakut-
Pushkin:
Hei, Chebeldei, Chebeldei.
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L
EAPCENTURIES
, leap-
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stocked in honeycomb-troughs,
bits
on chips,
the menorah-poem from Berlin,
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
cared for? A
-live?),
reading stations in the late-word,
dotted pilotlights line
the sky,
crestlines under fire,
feelings, frost-
spindled,
cold startâ
with hemoglobin.
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S
OURCEPOINTS
, at night,
on the expressways,
expectant of the gods,
your foothills, Brainmountain,
in the heart-you,
by them
foamed around.
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the halftransformed pull
at one of the worlds,
the diselevated one, interiorized,
speaks under the foreheads on the bank:
Quits with death, quits with
God.
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Y
OU BE LIKE YOU
, always.
Stant up Jherosalem inde
erheyff dich
Even he who cut the band with you,
inde wirt
erluchtet
tied it anew, in the gehugnis,
mudclots I swallowed, in the tower,
language, dark pilaster strip,
kumi
ori.
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do not send out,
stand
inward:
transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ's pre-Script,
not overtakable,
I take you in,
instead of any
rest.
in Hereafter's
pithead:
there
where we find ourselves,
Earthy, always,
a
belated
bucket conveyor pierces
us cloudtorn,
upward, downward,
seditious
piping inside, on Fool's
legs,
the flightshadow in
the iridescing round
heals us in, into seven-
heighth,
ice-age-close
the feltswan pair steers
through the hovering
stone-icon
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Y
OU LIE
in the great listening,
ambushed, snowed in.
Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Swedenâ
Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Edenâ
The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for none, for everyoneâ
The Landwehr canal will not roar.
Nothing
                stalls.
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L
ILAC AIR
with yellow windowstains,
Orion's belt above the
Anhalter ruin,
flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,
from
standing bar to
snow bar.
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W
ELLDIGGER
in the wind:
someone will play the viola, day downward, in the alehouse,
someone will stand on his head in the word Enough,
someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch.
This year
does not roar across,
it throws back December, November,
it turns up its wounds,
it opens up to you, young
grave-
well,
twelvemouth.
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Â
with the moldering crust
delusion bread.
Drink
from my mouth.
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U
NREADABILITY
of this
world. Everything doubles.
The strong clocks
agree with the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
forever.
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W
HORISH ELSE
. And eternity
bloodblack circumbabeled.
Mudflood-swamped
by your loamy locks,
my faith.
Two fingers, far from the hand,
a-row the moory
oath.
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Â
at this voice? On what
does this
voice
sew
hither, beyond?
The chasms are
sworn in on White, from them
arose
the snowneedle,
swallow it,
you order the world,
that counts
as much as nine names,
named on knees,
tumuli, tumuli,
you
hill away, alive,
come
into the kiss,
a flip of the fin,
steady,
lights up the bays,
you drop
anchor, your shadow
strips you off on the bush,
arrival,
descent,
a chafer recognizes you,
you approach
each other,
caterpillars
spin you in,
the Great
Sphere
grants you passage through,
soon
the leaf buttons its vein to yours,
sparks
have to cross through
for the length of a breathdistress,
you are entitled to a tree, a day,
it decodes the number,
a word with all its green
enters itself, transplants itself,
follow it
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I hear the place is unnamable,
I hear the bread that looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread the woman baked for him,
I hear they call life
the only shelter.
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W
ITH THE VOICE OF THE FIELDMOUSE
you squeak up,
a sharp
clamp,
you bite through the shirt into my skin,
a cloth,
you slide across my mouth,
midway through my
words weighing you, shadow,
down.
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Â
skins, Epi-
leptic one,
I bed you, on the cornices,
the gable-
holes
bury us, with lightdung.
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S
NOWPART
, arched, to the last,
in the updraft, before
the forever dewindowed
huts:
flatdreams skip
over the
chamfered ice;
to carve out
the wordshadows, to stack them
around the cramp
in the crater.
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Â
whose guest I
will have been, a name,
sweated down the wall,
up which a wound licks.
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Y
OU WITH THE DARKNESS SLINGSHOT
,
you with the stone:
it is overevening,
I light behind myself.
Take me down,
be serious about
us.
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Â
in the thorned
rockshelter. (Get drunk
and call it
Paris.)
The shoulder, freezesealed;
immobile
tawdry owls on it;
letters between the toes;
certainty.
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Â
B
E SLOPPY
, Pain,
don't slap her face
you yourself botch
the sand boil in
the white Beside.
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P
ARCELED GOODS
baked,
groschen-size, from
over-ripe light;
desperation thrown in,
scatter-grit;
lifted up onto the rail, the full
shadow-wheel truck.
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Â
come in, as the night,
the jury rig
billows,
enshrined
aboard
is your scream,
you were there, you are below,
down below you are,
I go, I go with the fingers
from me,
to see you,
with the fingers, you, the One Below,
the arm stumps run riot,
the beacon thinks
for the single-
star sky,
with the sword keel
I pick you up.
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Â
slackmawed
fool above the treadwheel:
from your earlobe
hangs and
hops your eye,
greened.
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Thought-sister, heath stroll close:
sur-