From "The Relief"

Paul Celan (Paul Antschel, 1920–1970)was born in Romanian Cernauti, formerly Czernowitz Bukovina, now Chernivtsi Ukraine.

From light's curvatures on the angles of your pale cast, your parted lips form a shadow for air, as for a voice from the timbre of silence, like a beggar content with a smoke after lunch—fortunate the length of that cigarette, as on the lips of the condemned. Clouds thicken in the cold gray of late afternoon, identified only by the numbers on my watch. It is, as said, those with little look up to you and possess; they know how much is necessary to hold, but those who abandon you see only with a brute sense. Your eyes cannot close. They share the night.

*

You watch over narrow N. Pryboya Boulevard, not the strasse of a hundred years ago. Who was N. Pryboya? I believe Antschel would remember the name of the strasse and you outside my kitchen window, your Hapsburg face faithful as daylight— a silence without lament—more human than of marble, more like a face carved in an apple, dried, as if without withering. Still, after so much, you have not vanished along the way, your features the blush of ripeness, a visibility in relief—the lines of age unspoken.

*

For the time being all is fixed to a moment. If only tomorrow's having been were as simple as yesterday, having survived it. What remains holds its place in wider circumference— a form of departure like a crumbling concrete vacant lot, relinquished. Such wilderness is a stone age, longed for, nonetheless. Your severance compels: Let not my house be squandered. Yet, you have never worried how long a fabrication can last— what is loss, if not human? Callused palms and thick fingers fashioned you with a good time in mind. . . . To think, whitewash, a few repairs, the kindness of hands, will keep you.

*

Those who saw you and see you no more; those who have seen you for years, who know of your face; those who glance up as if staring at a tin can in the city dump; those who see you for the first time and each time after, who take your image, your shadowed hollows, to the grave— is it your mask those men and women, buried here, mirror in the clear midnight of the Resurrection, each plot its candle, the sky smelling of wax? Hidden and apparent, your expression is dry-eyed, set as a bride who waits to marry her second husband in the Palace of Solemn Events.

*

Of solitude, of things human without someone, your portrayal: Bukovinan? Ukrainian? or Beatrice? Eurydice? Maybe Anschtel's mother would recall when you were cast, then placed in your continuum—the question posed above a Viennese photographer's prop in the Hall of Mirrors, where headless a man and woman in formal dress wave from the painted buggy. In the amusement park, cavalry of the first world war trained as children on the carousel. Perhaps a few people, living the day you become a mound of white dust on the pavement, may remember your resemblances.

*

Few think twice about your presence now. Your street of poplars remains—snow in each niche. A house is a division of flats. Behind you the brick-made space for an intimate life: your body, part wood, part glass, of the window. Your form recedes over lamplight in the folds of curtains. You've never wept nor will— what we see is snow melting or rain; it finds the Prut, eventually the Black Sea, the current of primitive awareness, the infinite distances as when I stand among winter trees, as one among ruins. Still here, the jangling clop of horse and wagon— Mercedes and Ladas, their engines gunned.

*

March, late afternoon, beads of moisture appear on your mask like sweat from the plaster, or come to you like dew, like the cries of a finch from the poplar in its flurry of seeds drifting down, as snow through dust, blown across these consequences, things to come in a dark alive in its...