Wild Gratitude Read Online Free PDF

orphans.
    I went to Vienna with a suitcase of bruised
    manuscripts, a stick of salami, a loaf of bread
    and thirty shillings. All winter I shivered
    in an icy room and attended somber lectures
    on the sublime in German. I sold newspapers
    and scrubbed floors at the Collegium Hungaricum
    until a Mæcenas sent me to the Sorbonne.
    That’s when I lived at 10 Rue de la Huchette
    and wrote in French about the iron world of factories,
    our inheritance of empty lots and slums. One night
    I shouted from the rooftops that I was homesick—I
    wanted the distant earth to roar in my lungs
    and I missed the dark vowels of my own language.
    But I was a lost European at home. In 1927
    I fell in love with a wealthy girl whose parents
    snatched her away from me. Oh Márta, my poppy,
    I’ll confess to anything but your betrayal:
    indecent exposure, sedition, espionage, poverty.
    I went mad twice. Once I saw the wind
    kneel down in the soot like a crazed preacher;
    once I saw the large red claws of darkness
    scratch out the eyes of night. I hid in stairways
    because I believed that the streets were on fire,
    every street lamp was a warrant for my arrest.
    I wanted an insurrection and in the hospital
    I yelled that the rugs on the floors of all rich
    merchants are the scalps of our young brothers,
    the animals; I screamed that the bright roses
    flowering on coffee tables in their living rooms
    are the scalps of our sisters in the garden.
    After that, I lived on the rim of a grave city
    with an illegible scrawl on my high forehead.
    My comrade and I passed out fervent red leaflets
    and argued about the Paris Commune of ‘71, the Budapest
    Commune of 1919. I joined the underground Party
    but I was expelled for Trotskyist leanings.
    Every winter I watched the snow gather in the streets
    as the wind stripped down the stark December trees
    and every year I spluttered like a village idiot
    during the first hard agonies of another spring.
    Every day I watched the same sun struggle out of three
    smokestacks with the same smoke nestled in its arms
    and every night I watched another wide moon
    congealing in the clouds. I was always hungry.
    One year I ate every other morning, one year
    I ate every other afternoon. My darling and I
    shared a double fever and slept on a narrow couch.
    One night she tried to swallow a bottle of lye
    and I raved against God like a blunt descendant
    of Satan, or the gaunt edge of an old sickle.
    Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a nail or a hammer,
    a handcuff or a pen, a secret or a blind omen.
    I’m like a sad bear dancing in an empty forest.
    I’d give my legs for a salary of two hundred pengös.
    I’ve pawned everything but my own flesh and blood.
    Today when I stood at the blank window, I discovered
    a thousand wooden crosses blooming in the cemetery
    and when I stared at my own reflection I realized
    that my mother was a young woman when she died.
    I know that I am Freud’s deviant, starving son
    and my button-down shoes are four sizes too big,
    my pockets are filled with weightless blue pebbles.
    When the Health Service sent me to a rural sanatorium
    I fell in love with my analyst. I bellowed and moaned,
    I invoked the faithfulness of dogs, the fatigue
    of slaves, but nothing helped. And I came home.
    I admit that I’m desperately in need of a job
    and I’ll agree to anything: I’m honest, I’m
    an excellent typist, I can speak French and German,
    I can take dictation and crawl on all fours.
    I’m a gymnast of the dialectic and I can sing
    the startled green lyrics of a prisoner’s song.
    This is a promissory note and a curriculum vitae,
    this is a last will and testament: On April 11, 1905,
    I was sentenced to thirty-two years of hard labor,
    but I was innocent. Where is that freight train?
    I am cutting off my right sleeve with a scissors.
    I am leaving my right arm to a strange god.
Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence
    Paris, 1948
    It’s daybreak and I wish I could believe
    In a rain that will