Both-handed

You can be a good person and still be sexy
– Britney Spears

Beidhändige Frühe
holt sich mein Aug,
dann erscheinst du –

wieviel Möwengefolge
hat deine Stirn?

Seegängerisch knattert das Wort,
dem ich absagte, an dir
vorbei,

ein von Steinwut schwingendes Tor noch,
gesteh’s der
notreifen Nacht zu.

[29/9/69]

when is it not a question of last things?
– Paul Celan

BOTH-HANDED dawn
hold up my eye
till you appear

how many seagulls stall
above your forehead?

The word rattles like surf
my negative by
you

a stone-mad swinging door
give up
too earlynight

It's always too late

About 20 April 1970, around Passover, Celan went from the bridge into the Seine and, though a strong swimmer, drowned unobserved. ... Mail piled up under the door of his barely furnished flat. Gisèle called a friend to see if perhaps her husband had at last gone to Prague. On 1 May a fisherman came on his body seven miles downstream. …

People have said that Celan took his own life at forty-nine because valid speech in German was impossible after or about Auschwitz. Yet this was the impossibility that incited him … And he did speak – more validly than could ever have been imagined.

Maybe he felt too alone: “no one / witnesses for the / witness.”

– John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995)

It’s always too late
when you got nothing
– Nine Days

it’s always too late
when you got
nothing
walking in the rain
or under girders

seeing in a special way
the light from
buses, passing
did I ask you?
what?

too soon, no doubt
my friend is
Wendy
Wendy Nushe’s trying to
climb out

Dark

Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself
– Paul Celan

DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho
hirnstrom-
hin,

Die Bühne über der Windung,
auf die es zu stehn kommt,

soviel
Unverfenstertes dort,
sieh nur,

die Schütte
müssiger Andacht,
einen
Kolbenschlag von
den Gebetssilos weg,

einen und keinen.

[5/9/68]

La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose
26.3.69

DARK splinter echo
nerve im
pulse

the groyne above the turn
where it ends up

panopticon
it’s not
just look

the worship
chute
one
riflebutt away
from prayer silos

one none