Paul Celan

With the voice of the fieldmouse
you squeak up to me,

a sharp
clip,
you bite your way through my shirt to the skin,

a cloth,
you slide across my mouth
midway through the words

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

Ashglory behind
your shaken-knotted
hands at the threeway.

Pontic erstwhile: here,
a drop,
on

the drowned rudder blade,
deep

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.

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

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?—,

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,

Where am I
today?

The dangers, all,
with their appliance,
hickishly gamey,

pitchfork-high
the heavensfallow hoisted,

the losses, chalkmouthed—you

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,

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.