Others

The Deaf and Blind
Do we reach the sea with clocks
In our pockets, with the noise of the sea
In the sea, or are we the carriers
Of a purer and more silent water?
The water rubbing against our hands sharpens knives.
The warriors have found their weapons in the waves
And the sound of their blows is like
The rocks that smash the boats at night.
It is the storm and the thunder. Why not the silence
Of the flood, for we have dreamt within us
Space for the greatest silence and we breathe
Like the wind over terrible seas, like the wind
That creeps slowly over every horizon.

La terre est bleue
La terre est bleue comme une orange
Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas
Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter
Au tour des baisers de s'entendre
Les fous et les amours
Elle sa bouche d'alliance
Tous les secrets tous les sourires
Et quels vêtements d'indulgence
À la croire toute nue.
Les guêpes fleurissent vert
L'aube se passe autour du cou
Un collier de fenêtres
Des ailes couvrent les feuilles
Tu as toutes les joies solaires
Tout le soleil sur la terre
Sur les chemins de ta beauté.

At the Window
I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among
us. There was
a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain
indifference, I
have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had
nothing to
say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by
a thread.
There was a time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the
water.
All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what
fantastic
creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my
imagination
enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my
own. The
language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not
touch the flesh
of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so
that nothing
could attempt to convince me of error.

With Every Thought

With every Thought I went
out of the World: there you were,
you my Gentle One, you my Open One, and –
you received us.


Who
says that for us everything died,
that for us there the Eye broke?
Everything woke, all things began.


Vast, a Sun came swimming by, bright
a Soul and a Soul engaged, clear,
masterfully made a silence for it
a path ahead.


Lightly
you opened your Lap, quiet
rose a Breath in the Aether,
and what became cloud, was it not,
was it not Form, and for us then,
was it not
as good as a Name?

With Every Thought

With every Thought I went
out of the World: there you were,
you my Gentle One, you my Open One, and –
you received us.


Who
says that for us everything died,
that for us there the Eye broke?
Everything woke, all things began.


Vast, a Sun came swimming by, bright
a Soul and a Soul engaged, clear,
masterfully made a silence for it
a path ahead.


Lightly
you opened your Lap, quiet
rose a Breath in the Aether,
and what became cloud, was it not,
was it not Form, and for us then,
was it not
as good as a Name?

The Triumph Of Achilles

In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
cannot be trusted-their
source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?

In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.

There Was Earth

There was Earth in them, and
they dug.


They dug and they dug, and so
their Day went by, and their Night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew of all this.


They dug and they heard nothing more;
did not grow wise, invented no Song,
thought up for themselves no Language.
They dug.


There came a Silence, there came a Storm,
There came every Ocean.
I dig, you dig, and it digs, the Worm,
and the Singing, there, says: They dig.


O someone, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did it lead to, that nowhere-leading?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger awakens the Ring.

Tallow Lamp

The monks with hairy fingers opened the book: September.
Now Jason pelts with snow the newly sprouting grain.
The forest gave you a necklace of hands. So dead you walk the rope.
To your hair a darker blue is imparted; I speak of love.
Shells I speak and light clouds, and a boat buds in the rain.
A little stallion gallops across the leafing fingers--
Black the gate leaps open, I sing:
How did we live here?


(from Mohn und Gedachtnis by Paul Celan, trans. by Michael Hamburger)

Tallow Lamp

The monks with hairy fingers opened the book: September.
Now Jason pelts with snow the newly sprouting grain.
The forest gave you a necklace of hands. So dead you walk the rope.
To your hair a darker blue is imparted; I speak of love.
Shells I speak and light clouds, and a boat buds in the rain.
A little stallion gallops across the leafing fingers--
Black the gate leaps open, I sing:
How did we live here?


(from Mohn und Gedachtnis by Paul Celan, trans. by Michael Hamburger)

The Poles

The Poles
are within us,
insurmountable
while Awake,
we sleep across, to the Gate
of Mercy,


I lose you to you, that
is my Snow-Comfort,


say, that Jerusalem is,


say, as if I were this
your Whiteness,
as if you were
mine,


as if without us we could be we,


I open your leaves, forever,


you bless, you bed
us free.

Psalm


No-man kneads us again out of Earth and Loam,
no-man spirits our Dust.
No-man.


Praise to you, No-man.
For love of you
we will flower.
Moving
towards you.


A Nothing
we were, we are, we shall
be still, flowering:
the Nothing-, the
No-man’s-rose.


With
our Pistil soul-bright,
our Stamen heaven-torn,
our Corolla red
with the Violet-Word that we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

Psalm


No-man kneads us again out of Earth and Loam,
no-man spirits our Dust.
No-man.


Praise to you, No-man.
For love of you
we will flower.
Moving
towards you.


A Nothing
we were, we are, we shall
be still, flowering:
the Nothing-, the
No-man’s-rose.


With
our Pistil soul-bright,
our Stamen heaven-torn,
our Corolla red
with the Violet-Word that we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

On my Right

On my Right – who? The Death-Woman.
And you, on my Left, you?

The Wandering-Sickles in extraheavenly
Place
mime themselves grey-white
Moon-Swallows, together,
Star-Swifts,

I plunge there
and pour an Urnful
down onto you,
in you.

Night Ray

Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:
to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.
Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;
it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:
it talks as I do when I grant admittance to hearts.
It knows a French song about love, I sang it in autumn
when I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my letters


to morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.
I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.
Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,
now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.
You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it's over.
I am lighter:
in front of strangers I sing.

Little Night

Little Night: when you
take me within, within,
up there,
three Pain-Inches above
the Floor:

all the Shroud-Coats of Sand,
all the Help-Nots,
all, that still
laughs
with the Tongue -

In Front of a Candle

I formed the holder of gold,
as you told me to mother,
gold, out of which She comes,
a shade, to me, in the middle
of fracturing hours,
your
being-dead’s daughter.


Slender in shape,
a thin, almond-eyed shadow,
her mouth and her sex
danced round by creatures from sleep,
out of the cave of the gold,
she rises up,
to the summit of Now.


With night-dark-shrouded
lips,
I speak the Prayer:


In the name of the Three
who fight with each other, until
heaven reaches down into the graveyard of feeling,
in the name of the Three, whose rings
gleam on my finger, whenever
I loose the hair of the trees into the abyss,
so that the richer floods rush down through the deeps


in the name of the first of the Three
who shrieked,
when he was called on to live,
where his word went before him,
in the name of the second, who watched it and wept,
in the name of the third, who piles
white stones in the middle –
I say you are free
of the amen that overpowers us,
of the ice-filled light at its rim,
there, where tower-high it enters the sea,
there, where the grey one, the dove
picks at the names
this side and that side of dying:
You still, you still, you still,
a dead woman’s child,
sealed to the No of my yearning,
wedded to a cleft in time
to which the mother-word led me,
so that a single spasm
would pass through the hand
that now, and now, grasps at my heart!

Ice, Eden

There is a Land that’s Lost,
Moon waxes in its Reeds,
and all that’s turned to frost
with us, burns there and sees.


It sees, for it has Eyes,
Earths they are, and bright.
Night, Night, Alkalis.
It sees, this Child of Sight.


It sees, it sees, we see,
I see you, you too see.
Ice will rise again before
This Hour shall cease to be.

I Can Still See You

I can still see you: an Echo,
to be touched with Feeler-
Words, on the Parting-
Ridge.


Your face softly shies away,
when all at once there is
lamp-like brightness
in me, at the Point,
where most painfully one says Never.

Count The Almonds

Count the Almonds,
count, what was bitter, watched for you,
count me in:


I sought your Eye, as it opened and no one announced
you,
I spun that hidden Thread,
on which the Dew, of your thought,
slid down to the Pitchers,
that a Speech, which no one’s Heart found, guarded.


Only there did you enter wholly the Name, that is yours,
stepping sure-footedly into yourself,
the Hammers swung free in the Bell-Cradle of Silences,
yours,
the Listened-For reached you,
the Dead put its arm round you too,
and the three of you walked through the Evening.


Make me bitter.
Count me among the Almonds.

Alchemical


Silence, like Gold cooked in
charred
Hands.


Vast, grey,
near as all that is Lost
Sisterly-Shape:


All the Names, all the with-
Burnt up
Names. So much
Ash to be blessed. So much
Land gained
above
the light, so light
Soul-
Rings.


Vast. Grey. Clinkerless.


You, then.
You with the pale
bitten-out bud,
You in the Wine-Flood.


(Did it not discharge
us too, this Hour?
Good,
Good, that your Word died away here.)


Silence, like Gold cooked, in
charred, charred
Hands.
Fingers, smoke-thin. Like Crowns, Air-Crowns
around – –


Vast. Grey. Trackless.
Queenlike.

Alchemical


Silence, like Gold cooked in
charred
Hands.


Vast, grey,
near as all that is Lost
Sisterly-Shape:


All the Names, all the with-
Burnt up
Names. So much
Ash to be blessed. So much
Land gained
above
the light, so light
Soul-
Rings.


Vast. Grey. Clinkerless.


You, then.
You with the pale
bitten-out bud,
You in the Wine-Flood.


(Did it not discharge
us too, this Hour?
Good,
Good, that your Word died away here.)


Silence, like Gold cooked, in
charred, charred
Hands.
Fingers, smoke-thin. Like Crowns, Air-Crowns
around – –


Vast. Grey. Trackless.
Queenlike.

Afternoon Of Circus And Citadel

In Brest, before the Fire-Hoops burning,
In the Tent, where Tigers sprang,
there I heard you, Finite, singing,
there I saw you, Mandelstam.

The Sky hung over the Roadstead,
the Gull, hung over the Crane.
The Finite sang there, the Constant –
you, the Gunboat, Baobab.

I hailed the Tricolor
with a Russian Word –
the Lost was Un-Lost,
the Heart Anchored there.

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Translated by Stephen Tapscott

Anonymous Submission