Translated by Kerry Cox.

MIT WECHSELNDEM SCHLÜSSEL (GW I, 112)

WITH A VARYING KEY

With a varying key
you unlock the house, in which
drifts the snow of what has been muted.
Your key always varies
depending on the blood that spurts,
from your eye or mouth or ear.

You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes
According to the wind that drives you,
the snow wraps itself around the Word.

Waldig (GW I, 116)

Wooded

Wooded, from the mating bellows of stags,
around the world presses the Word,
which fringes your lips,
infused from the prolonged summer.

She heaves it away and you follow him,
you follow him and stumble you sense,
as a wind, which you long entrust,
the arm bends around the heath to you:

who from sleep whence came
and sleep hence turned,
may lull he who is cursed.

You weigh it down towards the waters,
in which is reflected the kingfisher,
near to the nethermost nests.

You lull it downwards through the swath,
that craves snow deep in the tree-glow,
you lull it beyond to the Word,
which there names that which is already white on you.

Flügelnacht (GW I, 128)

Winged night

Winged night, come from afar and now
spread for ever
over chalk and lime.
Pebbles, rolling into the chasm.
Snow. And still more of the white.

Imperceptible,
what appeared brown,
thought-colored and wild
overgrown with words.

Lime is and chalk.
And pebbles.
Snow. And still more of the white.

You, you yourself:
In the foreign
eye bedded down, which this
glanced over.

Schneebett (GW I, 168)

Snowbed

Eyes, worldblind, in the cleft of death: I come
hardgrowth inside the heart.
I come.

Moonmirror sheerwall. Downwards.
(The miner's lamp bespeckled by breath. Scattered blood.
clouding soul, once again nearing in form.
ten-fingered shadow clamped.)

Eyes worldblind,
Eyes in the cleft of death,
Eyes eyes:

The snowbed under us both, the snowbed.
crystal by crystal,
timedeep latticed, we fall,
we fall und lie and fall.

And fall:
We were. We are.
We are one flesh with the night.
In the processes, the processes.

Allerseelen (GW I, 183)

Of all souls

What have I
done?
The night inseminated, as if there could
still another be, more nocturnal than.
this one

Birdflight, stoneflight, a thousand
specified courses. Glimpses,
robbed and plucked. The sea,
sampled, spent on drink, dreamt away. An hour,
spiritdarkened. The next, an autumn light,
offered up to a blind
feeling, which came that way. Others, many,
placeless their own heavy centers: glimpsed and avoided.
Foundlings, stars
black, full of language: named
after an oath annulled by silence.

And once (when? this also is forgotten):
having felt the barbed hook,
where the pulse of the electrical rectifier ventured.

Engführung (GW I, 195-204) excerpt only

The straitening

Yes.
Hurricanes, snow-
storm, there remained
time, remained,
to attempt it with stone he
was hospitable, he
did not interrupt. How
good we had it:

Grainy,
grainy and frayed. Axial,
dense;
grapy and radiant; renal-like,
flattish and
lumpy; loose, tang-
led; he, it
did not cut in, it
spoke,
willingly spoke to dry eyes, before closing them.

Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.

We
would not let go, stood
in the midst, a
porous edifice, and
it came.

Came at us, came
through us, patched
invisibly, patched
away at the last membrane
and
the world, a multi-faceted crystal,
catalyzed, crystallized.

EIS, EDEN (GW I, 224)

Ice, Eden

There is a country Lost,
a moon grows in its weeds,
where all that died of frost,
as we did, glows and sees.

It sees, for it has eyes,
each eye an earth and bright.
The night, the night, the lyes.
This eye-child's gift is sight.

It sees, it sees, we see,
I see you and you see.
Before this hour closes,
Ice will rise from the dead.

ERRATISCH (GW I, 235)

ERRATIC

The evenings entrench themselves in you
under eye. With the lip
collected syllables - beautiful,
silent plainness -
help the creeping star
in their middle. The stone,
temporally near once, ascends here outwards:

by all
dispersed
suns, soul,
were you, in Ether.

DIE HELLEN STEINE (GW I, 255)

THE BRIGHT
STONES pass through the air, the bright-
white, the light-
bringers.

They will
not descend, neither crash,
nor strike. They rise
up,
like the most trifling
dog-rose, so they become visible,
they soar
towards you, you my Light,
you my Truth :

I see you, you pluck them with my
new, my
anyone's hands, you place them
into the Once-again-Light, so that no one
needs to cry neither to name.

LE MENHIR (GW I, 260)

THE MENHIR

Growing
Stone-gray.
Gray figure, eye-
less you, stone glance, with which
the earth came out of us, human-like
into darkness, onto white moorish ways,
evenings, before
you, heaven's gorge.
Illegitimate, hauled here, lowered
down over the heart's back. The ocean-
mill ground.
Light-winged you hang, early,
between flora and stone,
small flowers.
Black phylactery-
colors, so were you all,
you with
praying blossoms.

HÜTTENFENSTER (GW I, 278-279)

TABERNACLE WINDOW

The eye, dark:
as a tabernacle window. It collects
what the world was, world remains: the wandering-
east, the
soaring ones, the
Men-and-Jews,
the people-from-the-clouds, magnetically
it pulls, with heart fingers, at
you, earth:
you come, you come,
reside will we, dwell, something

- a breath? a Name? -

passes about in the desolation,
dance-like, clumsy,
the angel-
wings, heavy from the unseeable, on the
sorely flayed foot, head-
heavy trimmed
from black hail, which
also fell there in Witebsk,

- and they, which seed him, they
write him away
with miming bazooka scrawl! -,

passes, passes around,
searches,
searches below,
searches above, distant, searches
with the eye, retrieves
Alpha Centauri downwards, Arktur, retrieves
the ray moreover, out of the graves,

proceeds to the ghetto and Eden, plucks
the star-picture together, so that he,
the man, needs to dwell, here,
among men,

strides
the letters down and of the letters' mortal-
immortal soul,
proceeds to aleph and Jew and goes further,

builds him, the shield of David, lets him
burst into flames, once,

lets him die down - there he stands,
invisible, stands
by alpha and aleph, by Jew,
by the others, by
all: in
you,

beth, - that is
the house, where the table stands with
the Light and the light.

IN DER LUFT (GW I, 290-291)

IN THE AIR, there remains your root, there
in the air.
Where the ground wraps itself, earthen,
Breath-and-loam.

Great
passes the Exiled One there above, the
Cremated One: a Pomeranian, at house
in a blossom-song, that remains maternal, summer-like, light-
blossomed on the rim
of all the jagged,
winterhard-cold
syllables.

With him
wander the meridians:
ab-
sorbed from his
sun-steered pain, which the lands fraternized after
the midday oath of a
cherished
distance. Of all
places is Here and is Today, is, from despair hither,
the radiance,
in which the Divided Ones tread with their
bedazzled mouths:

The kiss, nightly,
brands the meaning into language, which they awaken, they -:

turned homewards into
the unearthly expulsion,
collected by the dispersed, who
through the starry-wasteland soul of those led, who
tentmakers above in the expanse
of their glances and vessels,
the minute sheaves of hope,
in which it rustles from archangel wings, from fate,
the brethren, the sisters, those
too light, those too heavy, those too light
foundlings with
the worldscale in blood-
shameful, in the
terrible womb, the lifelong strangers,
sperm-like crowned with stars, heavy
stored in the Undeep, the bowels
piled up to a threshold, to a dam, - the

the substance of fords, over which
comes the clubbed foot of the gods
stumbling - for
whose
star time too late?

DU DARFST (GW II, 11)

You may comfortably
house me with snow:
as often as I shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree stride trough the summer,
cries his youngest
leaf.

HARNISCHSTRIEMEN (GW II, 28)

SLICKENSIDE STRIATIONS, axial faults,
migratory
points:
your land.

On both poles
of the cleft rose, legible:
your renegade word.
North true. South light.

WEGGEBEIZT (GW II, 31)

Etched away from
the nuclear wind of your speech
the garish talk of pseudo-
experience - the hundred- tongued lying-
poem, the noem.

Whirled
clear,
free
the way through the human-
like snow,
the penitent snow, to
the hospitable
glacial rooms and tables.

Deep
in time's crevasse
by the
honeycombed ice
waits, a crystal of breath,
your unimpeachable
testimony.

VOM GROSSEN (GW II, 35)

Out of the great
eye-
less One
created from your eyes:

the six-
edged, white-denied
Foundling.

A blind hand, it also is star hard
from Names-Wandering through,
it rests on it, as
long as it does on you,
Esther.

KEINE SANDKUNST MEHR (GW II, 39)

No more sand art, no sandbook, no master.

Nothing won at dice. How many
mutes?

Seventeen.
Your inquiry - your answer.
Your psalm, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eepinno,
Ee - i - o

DIE ZWISCHENEIN- (GW II, 143)

The intermittent-
hailing help
grows,

the formation of names
stops,

the glacial milk hauls
the full-grown through
the floating goal
of their unerring
fires.

DIE FLEISSIGEN (GW II, 151)

The industrious
mineral resources, domestic,

the heated syncope,

the indecipherable
Jubilee year,

the totally glassed in
spider-altars in all-
overtowering low buildings,

the median sounds
(still?),
the shadow palaver,

the fears, ice-right,
cleared for flight,

the baroque encased,
speech swallowing shower room,
semantically floodlit,

the unwritten wall
of a standing cell:

here

live yourself
straight through, without timepiece.

ANGEWINTERTES (GW II, 222)

Wintered windfield: here
you must live, grainy, pomegranate-like,
hard-packed from
the suppressing early frost,
the handwriting of the gloominess middle
in gold-yellow shadows - yet never
were you only bird and fruit -
of the star-bespittled
ultrasonic-wings,
for which you
sung.

SCHWARZE FLOCKEN (GW III, 25)

Black flakes

Snow is fallen, lightless. It is already a moon
or two, that autumn under a monkish habit
brought me good tidings; a leaf from Ukrainian mounds:
"Consider, that here winters also, for the thousandth time now
in a land, where the widest stream flows:
Jacob's heavenly blood, sanctified by axes . . .
O ice of unearthly redness - a chieftain wades with all
underlings into the darkening sun . . . Child, oh a cloth,
in which to shroud myself, when it gleams from the helmets,
when the ice floe, the reddish one, bursts, when the bones of your Father dusts snowily
the song of the cedar . . .
remorseful under the hooves,
A cloth, a narrow piece, which I preserve
now, as you learn to cry at my side
the narrowness of the world, which never greens, my child, from your child!"

The autumn, Mother, bled away from me, the snow burned me:
I sought for my heart that it might cry, I found the breath, oh of that summer,
it was like you.
A tear swelled up inside. I wove the cloth.

Das Flüsterhaus (GW III, 83-84)

The whisperhouse,
opened on leap-day,

to the Jute
given further, flattened-
deep,

it naturalizes
the narrow-sound,

to care for the
stuttering-threshold
the lip-
pins,

- engages the
Other,
early? -,

this, yes this
glacial scream
of your hands,

the dead-mountaineering party
carries with it on the perpetual snow,

the polarity reversed
moon
discards you, second
earth,

in the reposed heavens, death-proud, the
starry throng
takes the hurdle.

DIE POLE (GW III, 105)

THE POLES
are in us,
untransverseable
in vigil,
we sleep ourselves across, before the gate
of mercy,

I lose you to yourself, that
is my snow comfort,

say that Jerusalem is,

say it as if I were this
your white,
as if you were
mine,

as though we could be us without us,

I page through you, for always,

you pray, you bed
us free.