V. (One Might Think)

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1999 by Celan, Paul

One might think that everything that was said about the acacia-cross would be enough to preclude your vacation. You emptied the sources of light from the mirror, you enjoyed singing the acrostic of the unsoiled traveler amid aromas, sad and clairvoyant as the onion's flower, you sighed on the occasion of the kerchiefs fluttering in the gardens, you called Mariana, you called her by a color spread out together with the inks of life, but you forgot that a room is not a tree, that you eat its foliage with the spoon of remembrance and that the doors leading to the south have no keys. You could have stepped over their threshold before the flood of dawns, overwhelmed by fragrant elans, to flood yourself along with the lakes from the walls, to jump with the snowballs lost in the eyes of the anthropophagus bushes, to utter once more-for the last time-that word which hangs on the transparent icon of your restless neck: "rust." But rusty was the desert itself, into which you ventured, your sandal contaminated by the poetry of your papery adolescence, rusty was the adolescent paper you stepped on, on your way to the threshold. So you gave up.

You decided to climb the acacia without the precarious efforts of the star-gazer. The stars . . . How many times you wanted to recall their flashing eclipse in the honey spread on the table covered with poisons . . . it was one of those practices that made you leave the city. You left it in daytime, in sight of everybody, with a crammed suitcase in your brain, your pencil displayed over the amalgam made of wax and the first quarter moon.

How cheerful it was to scatter the glasses full of murmur on the hexagonal tombstone of love. Nobody saw you. You strolled alone through the streets guarded by enormous umbrellas, the parachutes of the dwarfs descended again into the earth. There was a rumor in the air, a rumor of bachelor coins gathered there to see you leave. You stopped for a moment to look at them: your suitcoat was open, for how else could you satisfy the lacy curiosity of your chest? They spoke to you about fox holes and blackbirds. Stubborn and passionate about the allogenic extremities of strolls, you thought that the moment had come to find them, despite the paralyzed inheritances. You were wrong again.

Didn't you notice that your steps were leading you to eiderdown boredoms? That the vast room of your possibilities, endangered by hawks wearing earrings, no longer matched the flag thrust in the pond with people disguised as motorboats? Didn't you understand that being a traveller you were subject to the leprous curtain of bloody tents? Oh, there was nobody in the tent? Was the rival's raven on the escutcheon at the entrance? The rival's raven with its hair of tea yellowed in the light of the birdless hour? Were you asked to provide a monosyllabic act of courage? To take a hike in the plundered site of impulses dose to the poppy? Yes, it's hard to find yourself a place where charcoal hands pampered the sand. It's hard to bear with you the orphan dreams of mourning eyesockets. It's hard . . .

But, tell me, you who knew how to flutter your shiny atrocities along with your glitter, you, obsessed by interims overcrowded with the fanged smelt of leafless news, you, the messenger of abscissas flourishing together with the salt of tears-answer:

Who drowned first? Who descended the stairs with disheveled hair and hardened the uneven undulations of posterity? Who fled the beloved's heart on a horse stolen from the neighbors? Who avoided his doak, who. .

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