Paul Celan

Why this sudden at-homeness, all-out, all-in? I can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike, you yourself slay your brothers: earlier than they I was with you, Snowed One. Throw your tropes in with the rest: Someone wants to know, why with God I was no different than with you, someone wants to drown in that, two books instead of lungs, someone who stabbed himself into you, bebreathes the cut, someone, he was the one closest to you, gets lost to himself, someone adorns your sex with your and his betrayal, maybe I was both

Where am I today? The dangers, all, with their appliance, hickishly gamey, pitchfork-high the heavensfallow hoisted, the losses, chalkmouthed—you upright mouths, you tables!— in the disangled town, harnessed to glimmerhackneys, —goldtrace, counterheaved goldtrace!—, the bridges, overjoyed by the stream, love, up there in the branch, niggling at the coming-escaping the Great Light elevated to a spark, on the right of the rings and all gain.

Vinegrowers dig up dig under the darkhoured watch, depth for depth, you read, the invisible one commands the wind to stay in bounds, you read, the Open Ones carry the stone behind the eye, it recognizes you, on a Sabbath.

Arnica, eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-die on top, in the Hütte, written in the book —whose name did it record before mine?—, in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker's word to come, in the heart, forest sward, unleveled, orchis and orchis, singly, raw exchanges, later, while driving, clearly, he who drives us, the mensch, he also hears it, the half- trod log- trails on the highmoor, humidity, much.

Threadsuns above the grayblack wastes. A tree- high thought grasps the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond mankind.

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.

Line the wordcaves with panther skins, widen them, hide-to and hide-fro, sense-hither and sense-thither, give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors and wildnesses, parietal, and listen for their second and each time second and second tone.

Black, like the memory-wound, the eyes dig toward you in the by heart-teeth light- bitten crownland, that remains our bed: through this shaft you have to come— you come. In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. The namegiving has an end, over you I cast my lot.

Ashglory 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.