Chymical; Tübingen, January; Tenebrae
Chymical
Silence, like gold cooked, in
charred
hands.
Great, grey
like all that’s lost near
sister shape:
All the names, all the to-
gether burnt
names. So much
ash to bless. So much
land won
over
the light, so light
soul-
rings.
Great. Grey. Cinder-
less.
You, then.
You with the faded
bit-open bud.
You in the wine flood.
(Isn’t it so, us, too,
this hour released?
Good,
good how your word here died past us.)
Silence, like gold cooked, in
charred, charred
hands.
Fingers, smoke-thin. Like crowns. Air crowns
round—
Great. Grey. Trace-
less.
King-
ly.
Tübingen, January
To blindness con-
vinced eyes.
Their—“a
riddle is source
sprung”—, their
memory of
hovering Hölderlin towers, gull-
whirred.
Visits of drowned carpenters by
these
plunging words:
Should,
should a man,
should a man come into the world, today, with
the lightbeard of the
patriarchs: he could,
were he to speak of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
moremore.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)
Tenebrae
Near are we, Lord,
near and reachable.
Reached already, Lord,
clawed in each other, as if
the flesh of each one of us were
your flesh, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Wind-bent we went,
we went to bow ourselves
over hollow and hole.
To drink we went, Lord.
It was blood, it was
what you had shed, Lord.
It shone.
It threw your image in our eyes, Lord.
Eyes and mouth stand so open and blank, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.
Pray, Lord.
We are near.
[Translated from the German by Bruce Lawder]