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Mouth

Mouth that pulls at my mouth.
Mouth that has pulled me along;
mouth that comes from afar
with beams to illuminate me.

Dawn that fires my nights
a red and white radiance.
Mouth crowded with mouths:
bird full of birds.
Song winging its way
upward and down.
Death that subsides into kisses,
into a thirst to die slowly,
you give the blood-stained grass
two wing beats that gleam.
The upper lip, sky,
the lower lip, earth.

Kiss moving through darkness:
kiss that comes rolling
out of the first graveyard
toward the outermost stars.
Star that has silenced
and stopped your mouth
until a celestial dew
flutters your eyelids.

Kiss moving toward the boys
and girls of tomorrow
who won’t let the streets
or the fields lie empty.

Mouths, however many now buried,
mouthless--we are digging up!
I drink for them from your mouth
with your mouth I toast all those
who'd imbibe the wine
in their loving glasses.
They're memories now only memories’
kisses turned sour and gone.

I sink my life in your mouth
I hear the booming of space
and infinity seems
to have poured itself over me.

I shall return to kiss you.
I have to return, and falling
Sink with the centuries
descending into the deep ravines
like a feverish snowfall
of lovers' kisses.

Mouth that with your tongue
drew out of the earth
the brightest dawn. Three words,
three fires you have inherited:
life, death, love. There they abide,
inscribed on your lips.

--translated bt Edwin Honig



THE WOUNDED MAN

for the wall of a hospital in the front lines


The wounded stretch out across the battlefields.
And from that stretched field of bodies that fight
A wheat-field of warm fountains springs up and spreads
out
into streams with husky voices.

Blood always rains upward toward the sky.
And the wounds lie there making sounds like seashells,
if inside the wounds there is the swiftness of flight,
essence of waves.

Blood smells like the sea, and tastes like the sea, and the
winecellar.
The wine cellar of the sea, of rough wine, breaks open
where the wounded man drowns, shuddering,
and he flowers and finds himself where he is.

I am wounded: look at me: I need more lives.
The one I have is too small for the consignment
of blood that I want to lose through wounds.
Tell me who has not been wounded.

My life is a wound with a happy childhood.
Pity the man who is not wounded, who doesn’t feel
wounded by life, and never sleeps in life,
joyfully wounded.

If a man goes toward the hospitals joyfully,
They change into gardens of half-opened wounds,
of flowering oleanders in front of the surgery room
with its bloodstained doors.

II.

Thinking of freedom I bleed, struggle, manage to live on.
Thinking of freedom, like a tree of blood
that is generous and imprisoned, I give my eyes and
hands
to the surgeons.

Thinking of freedom I feel more hearts than grains of
sand
in my chest: my veins give up foam,
and I enter the hospitals and I enter the rolls of gauze
as if they were lilies.

Thinking of freedom I break loose in battle
from those who have rolled her statue through the mud.
And I break loose from my feet, from my arms,
From my house, from everything.

Because where some empty eye-pit dawn,
she will place two stones that see into the future,
and cause new arms and new legs to grow
in the lopped flesh.

Bits of my body I lose in every wound
will sprout once more, sap-filled, autumnless wings.
Because I am like the lopped tree, and I sprout again:
because I still have my life.

--translaed by James Wright