Human curl, you'll not turn gray.
Empty almond, royal-blue.
SIBERIAN
Bowprayers — you
didn't recite them along, they were,
you think so, yours.
The crow-swan hung
from the early asterism:
with corroded lid fissure
a face stood — even under this
shadow.
Small bell, left
lying in the
icewind
with your
white pebble in the mouth:
Stuck in my
throat too, the millennium-
colored stone, the heartstone,
I too
develop verdigris on
my lip.
Over the rubble field here,
through the sedge sea today
she leads, our
bronze-road.
There I lie and talk to you
with skinned
finger.
THE SYLLABLE PAIN
It gave itself into Your hand:
a You, deathless,
at which all of I came to itself. Wordfree
voices drove around, empty forms, everything
entered them, mixed
and unmixed
and mixed
again.
And numbers too
were woven into the
uncountable. One and a thousand and what
before and after
was larger than itself, smaller, ripe-
ned and
back- and out-
transformed into
germinating Never.
The forgotten groped
the to-be-forgotten, continents, heartinents
swam,
sank and swam. Columbus,
fall
crocus in his sight, the mother-
flower,
murdered masts and sails. Everything left port,
free,
explorerish,
the windrose flowered and faded, ex-
foliated, a worldsea
bloomed a-heap and a-day, in the blacklight
of wild-lubber lines. In coffins,
urns, canopic jars
the little children
awoke : Jasper, Agate, Amethyst — peoples,
tribes and clans, a blind
Let there be
knotted itself in-
to the serpentheaded free-
ropes —: a
knot
(and counter- and contra- and yet- and twin- and thou-
sandknot), which
the carnival-sucking brood
of martenstars in the abyss
spell-, spell-, spelled
out, out.
AND WITH THE BOOK FROM TARUSSA
All poets are Jews
— Marina Tsvetayeva
Of the
constellation of Canis, of the
bright-star in it and the dwarf-
light that also weaves
on roads mirrored earthwards,
of
pilgrim-staffs, there too, of the south, alien
and nightfiber-near
like unsepulchered words,
roaming
in the orbit of attained
goals and stelae and cradles.
Of things
sooth-said and fore-told and spoken over to you,
of things
talked upwards,
on the alert, akin to one
of one's own heart-stones, that one spewed out
together with their in-
destructible clockwork, out
into unland and untime. Of such
ticking and ticking amid
the gravel-cubes with
(going back on a hyena spoor
traceable upwards)
the ancestral
line of Those-
of-the-Name-and-Its-
Round-Abyss.
Of
a tree, of one.
Yes, of it too. And of the woods around it. Of the woods
Untrodden, of the
thought they grew from, as sound
and half-sound and changed sound and terminal sound, Scythian
rhymes
in the meter
of the temple and of the driven,
with
breathed steppe-
grass written into the heart
of the hour-caesuras — into the realm,
the widest of
realms, into
the great internal rhyme
beyond
the zone of mute nations, into yourself
language-scale, word-scale, home-
scale of exile.
Of this tree, these woods.
Of the bridge's
broadstone, from which
he bounced across into
life, full-fledged
by wounds — of the
Pont Mirabeau.
Where the Oka doesn't flow. Et quels
amours! (Cyrillic, friends, I rode
this too across the Seine,
rode it across the Rhine.)
Of a letter, of it.
Of the one-letter, East-letter. Of the hard and
tiny word-heap, of the
unarmed eye that it
transmits to
the three
belt-stars of Orion — Jacob's
staff, you,
once again you come walking! —
on the
celestial chart that opened for it.
Of the table where this happened.
Of a word, from the heap
on which it, the table
became a galley-seat, from the Oka River
and its waters.
Of the passing word that
a galley-slave gnash-echos, into the late-summer reeds
of his keen-
eared thole-pin:
Colchis.
FROM ATEMWENDE / BREATHTURN
YOU MAY confidently
regale me with snow:
as often as I strode through summer
shoulder to shoulder with the mulberry tree,
its youngest leaf
shrieked.
IN THE RIVERS north of the future
I cast the net, which you
hesitantly weight
with shadows stones
wrote.
TO STAND, in the shadow
of the stigma in the air.
Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.
With all that has room in it,
even without
language.
THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
WORDACCRETION, volcanic,
drowned out by searoar.
Above,
the flooding mob
of the contra-creatures: it
flew a flag — portrait and replica
cruise vainly timeward.
Till you hurl forth the word-
moon, out of which
the wonder ebb occurs
and the heart-
shaped crater
testifies naked for the beginnings,
the kings-
births.
SINGABLE REMNANT —the outline
of him, who through
the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,
apart, at the snowplace.
Whirling
under comet-
brows
the gaze's bulk, towards
which the eclipsed, tiny
heart-satellite drifts
with the
spark caught outside.
— Disenfranchised lip, announce,
that something h
appens, still,
not far from you.
NO SANDART ANYMORE, no sandbook, no masters.
Nothing in the dice. How
many mutes?
Seventen.
Your question — your answer.
Your chant, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eepinno,
I-i-o.
HARBOR
Sorehealed: where-,
when you were like me, criss-
and crossdreamt by
schnappsbottlenecks at the
whore table
— cast
my happiness aright, Seahair,
heap up the wave, that carries me, Blackcurse,
break your way
through the hottest womb,
Icesorrowpen —,
where-
to
didn't you come to lie with me, even
on the benches
at Mother Clausen's, yes, she
knows, how often I sang all
the way up into your throat, hey-diddle-doo,
like the bilberryblue
alder of homeland with all its leaves,
hey-doodle-dee,
you, like the
astral-flute from
beyond the worldridge — there too
we swam, nakednudes, swam,
the abyssverse on
the fire red forehead — unconsumed by
fire the deep-
inside flooding gold
dug its paths upwards —,
here,
with eyelashed sails,
remembrance too drove past, slowly
the conflagration jumped over, cut-
off, you,
cut off on
the two blue-
black memory-
barges,
but driven on now also
by the thousand-
arm, with which I held you,
they cruise, past starthrow-dives,
our still drunk, still drinking
by worldly mouths — I name only them —
till over there at the timegreen clocktower
the net-, the numberskin soundlessly
peels off— a delusion-dock,
swimming, before it,
off-world-white the
letters of the
cat, the trolley, life, which
the sense-
greedy sentences dredge up, after midnight,
at which
neptunic sin throws its corn-
schnapps-colored towrope,
between
twelve-
toned lovesoundbuoys
— draw-well-winch back then, with you
it sings in the no longer
inland choir —
the beaconlightships come dancing,
from afar, from Odessa,
the leadline,
which sinks with us, true to our burden,
Owlglasses all that
downwards, upwards, and why not? sorehealed, where-,
when-
hither and past and hither.
THE JUGGLERDRUM,
from my heartpenny loud.
The rungs of the ladder, up
which Ulysses, my monkey, clambers toward Ithaca,
rue de Longchamp, one hour
after the spilled wine:
add that to the image,
which casts us home into
the dice-cup, where I lie by you,
unplayable.
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 Hradshin
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.
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,
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.
Noone
bears witness for the
witness.
THE 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?
FRIHED
In the house of the doubled delusion,
where the stoneboats 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, 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.
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.
ONCE
I did hear him,
he did wash the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and unending,
annihilated,
Ted.
Light was. Salvation.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
FROM FADENSONNEN/THREADSUNS
FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER
Blind, light-
bearded partition.
A cockchaferdream
floodlights it.
Behind it, complaint-rastered,
Freud's forehead opens up,
the tear, hard-
silenced outside,
links on with the sentence: