| POETRY |
Cinnamon fingers 1
(For Paul Celan)
In Paris, near the origins,
Tin in my fingers,
Not daring to do what he had done,
hung towards me still
on the white, breathed-on wall
his boyish soul,
angehaucht,
while morass and tower
could be overheard
up in the mulberry tree, in
murmurs of blood, from
your side out,
And I who never could
Sing his
‘an angel is ore
from overturned candlesticks’
far way past,
where the chestnuts
began their jenseits –
I was there
I breathed
his Seine, drowned signs,
end-rhyme,
there you do not
lie cramped.
Cinnamon fingers 2
(To my mother)
If you had them,
Then with the thimble
Like silver-white pointed nail-files
On the narrow edge of hands.
You stuck two of them into the air,
I as a child on the
Chessboard of old tiles
Sat and laughed
And you knew that there
Had to be two,
You and me,
And your cinnamon fingers
In the murky haze of
My face.
How I loved you,
Held something before your eyes,
Something you can never
be for children.
Thus I came straight at you,
Sailing over stone,
Until cinnamon your fingers
And onion
You shine, tender as a mother
Before the white world
Of those days.
Cinnamon fingers 3
You gave it
To the night in me.
A word that
Sprang at me
From your young mouth
And licked me like a
Tongue
Where I was a wound,
A man like a man,
And into my mouth death came
When you deeply kissed
and took me.
I had the years against me
Your supple body for me,
A time that became a tide
In the rainy days of
A small room somewhere
Out of the way, just like we knew
Everything
Your bed was red
The water from your cries
As clear as the spring
We did not know.
Sleep with me in
That never discovered bed
Of Betty Boop
And do not write to me.
Old-rose is the inner edge
Of Youth, the overturned
Tall-stemmed glasses
Our time,
Cinnamon beneath your skirts,
finiteness. |
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