Breathturn into Timestead Read online

where you, mired, test the wind.

  * * *

  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 upward—,

  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

  byworldly 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

  tower cranes write

  an unname, along which

  she clambers up, to the deathjump, 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 loadline,

  which sinks with us, true to our burden,

  owlglasses all this

  downward, upward, and why not? sorehealed, where—,

  when—

  hither and past and hither.

  * * *

  III

  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.

  * * *

  ANVILHEADEDNESS, at

  palfrey pace,

  alongside us, of the double

  slowly streaming redtrack.

  Silvery:

  Hoofsayings, lullaby-

  neighing—dream-

  hurdle and -weir—: no one

  shall go farther, nothing.

  You under me, centaurishly

  rearing,

  I empty into our across-

  roaring shadow.

  * * *

  LANDSCAPE with urnbeings.

  Conversations

  from smokemouth to smokemouth.

  They eat:

  the bedlamite’s truffle, a piece

  unburied poetry,

  found tongue and tooth.

  A tear rolls back into its eye.

  The left, orphaned

  half of the pilgrim-

  mussel—they gave it to you,

  then they bound you—

  listening it illuminates the space:

  the clinker game against death

  can begin.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  WHEN YOU LIE

  in the bed of missing bunting,

  by blueblack syllables, in

  the shadow of snowlashes,

  through thought-showers the steely

  crane comes swimming—

  you open yourself to him.

  His bill ticks you the hour

  into each mouth—in each

  chimes, with bloodred bell-rope, a silence-

  millennium,

  the hour and the reprieve

  coin each other to death,

  the taler, the groschen

  rain hard through your pores

  in

  the shape of a second

  you fly there and barricade

  the doors Yesterday and Tomorrow,—phosphorous

  like eternity-teeth,

  buds your one, then your other

  breast,

  toward the grips, under

  the strokes—: so tightly,

  so deeply

  sown

  is the starry

  crane-

  seed.

  * * *

  BEHIND COALMARKED sleep

  —our cottage is known—

  where our dreamcrest swelled, fiery, despite all,

  and I drove the goldnails into our

  coffin-beautiful morning

  swimming alongside,

  there the rods dipped royally before our eye,

  water came, water,

  savagely

  the skiffs bit through the grand-second memory,

  the mud-muzzled beasts drifted around us

  —that much

  no heaven caught yet—,

  what a weir, torn one,

  you were, once again!—, the beasts, the beasts, adrift,

  salthorizons

  were building on our glances, a mountain grew

  far outward into the ravine,

  where my world summoned

  yours, forever.

  * * *

  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 Hradčany

  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.

  * * *

  STARTING FROM THE ORCHIS—

  go, count

  the shadows of the steps up to it

 
behind the five-mountain childhood—,

  from it, I win

  the half-word for twelfth-night, from it

  comes my hand to grab you

  forever.

  A little doom, as big

  as the heartdot I set

  behind your my name

  stammering eye,

  is helpful to me.

  You also come,

  as if over meadows,

  and bring along the image of a quaywall,

  there—when

  our keys, deep in the refused,

  crossed each other heraldically—

  strangers play dice with what

  we both still own

  of language,

  of destiny.

  * * *

  HALFGNAWED, mask-

  miened corbel stone,

  deep

  in the eyeslit-crypt:

  Inward, upward

  into skull’s inside,

  where you break up heaven, again and again,

  into furrow and convolution

  he plants his image,

  which outgrows, outgrows itself.

  * * *

  FROM FISTS, white

  from the truth hammered

  free of the wordwall,

  a new brain blooms for you.

  Beautiful, to be veiled by nothing,

  it casts them, the

  thoughtshadows.

  Therein, immovable,

  fold up, even today,

  twelve mountains, twelve foreheads.

  Vagabond Melancholy, also star-

  eyed by way of you,

  hears of it.

  * * *

  BULLROARERS whizz into the light, truth

  sends word.

  Yonder, the shore’s

  slope swells toward us,

  a dark

  thousand-brightness—the

  ressurected houses!—

  sings.

  An icethorn—we too

  had called—

  gathers the tones.

  * * *

  EVENING, in

  Hamburg, an

  endless shoelace—at

  which

  the ghosts gnaw—

  binds two bloody toes together

  for the road’s oath.

  * * *

  AT THE ASSEMBLED

  signs, in the

  wordmembraned oiltent, at the outlet

  of time,

  groaned into brightness

  soundlessly

  —you, royal air, nailed

  to the plague-cross, now

  you bloom—,

  pore-eyed,

  pain-scaly, on

  horseback.

  * * *

  THE UPWARD-STANDING COUNTRY,

  cracked,

  with the flightroot, to which

  stonebreath accrues.

  Here also

  the seas rush in, out of the steep ravine,

  and your speech-

  pocked, panic

  heretic

  cruises.

  * * *

  THE PUSHED-AROUND

  ever-light, loam yellow,

  behind

  planetheads.

  Invented

  looks, see-

  scars,

  carved into the spaceship,

  beg for earth-

  mouths.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  IV

  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?

  * * *

  CELLO-ENTRY

  from behind pain:

  The powers, escheloned

  as the counterheavens,

  roll inexplicables before

  approach lane and arrival,

  the

  scaled evening

  stands full of lungbranches,

  two

  blaze-clouds of breath

  dig in the book

  which the temple-din opened,

  something comes true,

  twelve times glows

  the arrow-riddled yonder,

  she, black-

  biled, drinks

  the blackbiled’s seed,

  all is less, than

  it is,

  all is more.

  * * *

  FRIHED

  In the house of the doubled delusion,

  where the stone boats 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, with 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.

  * * *

  THE SILICIFIED SAYING in the fist,

  you forget that you forget,

  blinking, the punctuation marks

  crystallize at the wrist,

  through the earth

  cleft to the crest

  the pauses come riding,

  there, by

  the sacrifice-bush,

  where memory catches fire,

  the One Breath

  seizes you.

  * * *

  WHERE?

  In night’s friable matter.

  In grief-debris and -drift,

  in slowest uproar,

  in the wisdom-shaft Never.

  Waterneedles

  sew the burst

  shadow together—it fights its way

  deeper down,

  free.

  * * *

  KING’S RAGE, stonemaned, up front.

  And the prayers,

  gone up in smoke—

  stallions, pain-

  accrued, the

  untamable-obedient

  irregulars:

  psalm-hoofed, singing across

  open-, open-,
open-

  leafed Biblemountains,

  toward the clear, also

  clattering,

  mighty seagerms.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  SKULLTHINKING, dumb, on the arrowtrace.

  Your song of

  song, into the hard

  February-spark clamped,

  half-shattered

  jaw.

  The one, still

  to be traveled mile

  Melancholy.

  Ambushed now by the achieved, aimblue,

  upright in the skiff,

  also from the gnashing crag-

  blessings released.

  * * *

  EASTERSMOKE, flooding, with

  the letterlike

  keeltrack amidst.

  (Never was heaven.

  But sea still is, fire red,

  sea.)

  We here, we,

  glad for the passage, before the tent,

  where you baked desertbread