Death is a master from Germany.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.
There was earth inside them, and they dug.
Illegibility of this world. All things twice over. The strong clocks justify the splitting hour, hoarsely. You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.
The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.
I went with my very being toward language.
Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle.
Spring: trees flying up to their birds.
How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you’re there, with a splinter of life.
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.
The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.
Tall poplars – human beings of this earth!
Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself.
Between always and never.
Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.
The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.
What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit?
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.
The world is gone, I have to carry you.