After Paul Celan

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I hear once in spring blue moss grew on sandstone

I hear memory is what you choose to forget

I remember holding his limbs
and later something soft, hardly

lighter. It reminds me of the smallness
of language, how many afternoons

lying in the same room was called living
how a letter with only dearest should suffice

I hear there is beauty
to utterance, the white space

you throw out to hold on
to your own words

A translator will sometimes leave
a phrase untranslated

When I come across one
I read it as a little black hole

holding another person’s
tentativeness—

It says This is as far as I can go
It says You must work the rest alone

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Note: The piece also alludes to Ilya Kaminsky and Jack Gilbert.

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