Paul Celan's Birthday

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-didlle-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
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
cat, the trolley, life, which
the sense-
greedy sentences dredge up, after midnight,
at which
neptunic sin throws its corn-
schnapps-colored towrope,
between
twelwe-
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 that
downwards, upwards, and why not? sorehealed, where-,
when-
hither and past and hither.

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