7. Mandelstam

a very fragile person with a strongly ringing sound.
The centuries transform into storm. History whirls
away like a blizzard, unseen figures wander like
pillars of foaming snow. History has come to an end,
the blizzard reigns, the polar song of un-human
conditions.
My time, my beast.
Time swallowed the tiny, fragile person and spat out
the little bones like fish bones.
On the basalt plains of the universe the small,
delicately carved bones glimmer like letters.
Or in the billion-depth of the universe like zodiac
images – letters.
Why does man speak? speaks in order to be able to
think. The language of skeletal structure. The
preciously meticulously carved out letters – the frail
wrist bone, the metacarpals´ thin flutes, the finger joints brittle
as the slow whistling of the polar wind. Between the
skull´s lips: the letters of sounds written in memory,
in the wind of death.

The three frail men sang in the burning furnace, in
the chaos of the Jewish death, in the original chaos
of the world:
the song of letters.

God created man as a sign, sounds calling out in the
wind.
The earth as a castle, a sun castle, an ice castle, a
dream-body.

With his face downwards, the torch extinguished in
the subterranean stream: the eyelashes of Antonius
captured in ice, lowered, immobile – the foam of
oblivion on the lips of the dark doomed people,
mumbling the syllables of oblivion the species gasping
on its deathbed. Barb wire, crushed fingernails for
the wining herds of guilty and innocent, normal and
rare.
”The earth is a castle which is a gift from God.”
This thought is too vast. The little man born in 1891
in the midst of centuries, people, history, cities,
letters disappears staggering under it out into the
blizzard, out beyond the world´s boundaries. From You,
Poor, every movement of the tongue every sound of the
throat will be claimed all the way to the last piece.
In the depth of the world´s night the glimmering bone
remnants rest. Can the world start anew with its
innocent morning, its cathedrals?

The enormous century mumbles. A child with long
eyelashes is being born.
He calls out the Name so loud that it departs from
him; in return the world is transformed into the Name
of the Jewish darkness.