You Will Always Be
Untamable
- Poems
-
Translated by Richard
Hacken
From Galsan Tschinag, Nimmer
werde ich Dich zähmen können
(Frauenfeld, Switzerland: Waldgut Verlag, 1996)
The Miracle
The miracle
Circling in the stars
Is mine to pull down
And hold
I force words from you
That suit my ears
And think myself justified
To build a nest
Where I can make them hatch
Into light little birds
Capable of flying out
To bring back for us
Those days that are gone
A Blade Of Grass
A blade of grass
On your steppe
I rebel against the storm winds
Searching for something solid
The blade
That must grow next to me
I reach and reach
Into emptiness
Until I realize
I will have to stand
By myself
Let Nobody
Come Too Near Me
Let nobody come too near me
Inside me is a bubbling
and a seething
I am energized with forces
Granted
To the son of the sky
And grandson of the mountains
Stillness born in the primordial hour
Spreading out and attending me
All along my path
Will, when the day is ripe,
Impose itself on earth’s crusty hide
Penetrate its pores
And grow to fires
That can never be extinguished.
The World
When the world
Surrounded by ticking clocks
Pauses for once
And the silence
Pours out
Filling you
To all your extremities
That is the moment
Of truth
You must look in the eye
And confess:
Have you been as honest
With yourself as much
As you’ve beaten down others
With your honesty?
Inside The
Morning
Within the morning
Lives a secret
Get up, my large-eyed woman
I would like
To chase after
The beams of sun
With you
And find out
Why they bend around and
Away from the yurt
When you’re not there
Without that certainty
I don’t plan on getting any older
And if I die at all
I intend on doing that
Only after lifting the veil
On all the secrets
Of this earth and
Laying them at your feet
Festering
Festering
Without you
Time drags
Hour after hour
It stacks up
With nothing but stillbirths
I can’t name
A single name
For what is going on around me
But I know I have
To stand and watch it all
Meager The Warmth In The Hut
Meager the warmth in the hut
The oven has gone out
Perhaps
Two people are lying
With their backs to each other
Such that the heat of their bodies
Slips away from them
Both are weaving at a dream
If only the snow
Absent
Into the second month of winter
Would finally appear
Maybe it would patch up all the breaks in the
ground
Who knows
Your Love
Your love was
A mighty river
That flooded and carried me
Into another, even more beautiful land
For the length of a dream
I was
Another nobler being there
And when I awakened
I found my Altai
Had become bluer yet and
Whiter again
Related
To the landscapes
In your eyes
On The
Dreary Days
On the dreary days
Creeping towards me
And wading into me
Hour after hour
I pull my parts together
Until I squat as small as a sparrow
Unable to fly away
Or even to bear
What’s happening to me
At your intervention
The sparrow transforms itself
Into an eye
In which is found one tear
Full of stars
Blue
Stillness
Blanketed in the blue
Stillness of the steppe
You stand
In my thoughts
Solar faces
Shine around you and
Flow into one another
They have illuminated you
Along the years
Have led you across
To me and have themselves
Finally flowed into me
I am the youngest
Among your suns
A Storm Of Birds
A storm of birds
Like stones catapulted
At you and me
From across the far shore of the time-river
With the lusterless look
Of the incoming age
We accompany
The scattering swarm
Beyond the woods
That received us in life
But now will outlast even our children
By centuries
I Saw Your
House
I saw your house
Twenty times as large
As the yurt
Where I wanted
To take you as my bride
So now I know
The efforts
I owed
To fit you
Into my life
Should have been
Twenty times greater
To counter it
My love
Would have been encased
As a coffin in your home
While I myself
Stayed outside
Those That
Devastated You
Those that devastated you
Were aware
That I was to follow
Their preparations have been
Well made
Your body is
A fortress
Nowhere
Can I touch
Without wounding myself
On the ramparts
Of foreign invasions
Today
Again
Today again
Your tongue slipped
Like a snake the name
Hissed out of you
Which I will have to swallow
No doubt a thousand times more
But never will digest
For our sake I wish
You could empty out the years
The cemetery of your previous life
But memory alone
Is the barbed hook
That will never set it free
All My
Brightness
Mixing all my brightness
In a drink
And setting it before you
Maybe that will loose
The braids of time
Stuck to you so long
And now branching out against me
Like a spider’s web?
Let My
Love Be Water
Let my love be water
With it, the precious water
Scooped from the fountain of my heart
I will wash away
All smudges from your name
And drive off any foreign elements
From our surroundings
Let my love be fire
With it, the wild fire
Ignited by flames of lunacy
I will scorch away the crust
Of your all-indulgent skin
And get down to your core
Let my love be stone
With it, the heavy stone
Broken from our tired bones
I will bury the years
Now flying back
To tear us apart
On A Path
On a path
Of soft blue
And warm yellow
I wander
All the wrinkles of earth’s body
Are flooded with lights
The elements face each other
In a gentle passion of daybreak
The birds sing songs
I’ve incubated myself
Released to hazy distances
I live awaiting the wonder
That will happen
Later today
At the eleventh hour
Strange And Foreign
Strange and foreign festival
Streaked with rain
Unreal as any word
Whispered in the dream state
The city is
A lame bird
Dodging and dozing
Under a shrub
The houses are
Its drooping wings
Each window
A weeping eye
Since you’re with me
I overlook
The misery
Of the roots you know
I stand Colossus-like
The prince from a fairy tale
In which, facing off all doubters,
You alone believe
Heavily I
Made It
Heavily
I made it across
The night
Under my pillow
Ticked
The punishment
For my delay
In each
Of your skin folds
I knew
The gnome
Who, left behind
By my predecessors
Guarded
You against me
The yurt stands
The fire burns
The mother lives
Rainwater runs across the floor
Slides cord-thin past the chest
With the scuffed corners
Comes to a halt and
Splinters into three threads
Each one eats its way
Forward through sparse yellow steppe grass
With the single-mindedness of fire
From the trembling trident I recognize
The lines of my own palm
Years of life lie assembled
In a herd like yaks
On a twin island stripped bare
In each trickle is the flicker
Of reddish-black water
With a blue fin
In my temples there seems to be a pounding
That curls into a question:
Will the tripartite water
Reach the ocean?
Clouds
Froth Up
Clouds froth up
Woods flutter in the wind
Primeval forces are
At work
Indigestibly
You lie
Sideways in me
And I know
You will always
Be untamable
Leaf Piles
That Scattered
Leaf piles that scattered
In the wind of birds taking flight
And that flamed for a hundred days
Along the edges of pathways
Must now
Freeze
In order to fit
The groove of time and
Disappear
From the face of earth
The same river of time
Will carry me
Out of your life
And wash me up on a shore
Unreachable
Even in your dreams
A Leaf
Attached To You
I am a leaf attached to you, my tree,
A piece of fluff from your fibrous body
The water of life comes running
To me through you
And the path to the treetop carries me
Across your hollows and hills
The time crashing against you
Into pieces of day and night
Always confronts me at the trunk
And keeps me turning
Next to you
I storm through each hour of life
In the effervescence of elements
That come from the hub of earth
And if even a thousand years
Were allotted me
I would find no time
To wither but would remain
Ever green at your side
I Don’t
Always Want
I don’t always want
To be the one who goes
To the things of this earth
To explain himself
For once, if you please
The mountain
Can show up at my place
And hold out the stones
That tumble down and mean me
He can say out loud
That insanity is the other
Inappropriate word for
Being trans-ported
And that the poet
Is a human mountain
I want to know
The wind at my side, so it
Will hunt for powers in me
Will learn to grow to a storm
And flatten whatever does not deserve
To take up life-space
All abandoned dreams
May nestle under my wings
I will train them
To face the vultures
The Stone
The stone
Which is your word and
Strikes
The stone
Which is your word and
Kills
Comes flying
In a low arc
Horrified
I stretch forth
A shield of lies
The word-stone
Bounces off
Missing me
And dropping away with my love
Irretrievably
To the point of no return
The Yellow
Of The Sun
The yellow of the sun combined
With the grayness of the valleys
Merging into blue
Silver-threaded strands peeled away
From the onrushing morning
Streamed in light and floating lines
Towards the unending distances
Mountain and hill began
To stagger and sway
Into the glacier-bright Altai
The fifteenth of July marched in
Grasses grew, winds blew
And every hair’s breadth of me
Was filled with you
Two People
Two people
Separate
Going two
Respectively wrong
Directions
In the heart of each
Sits a knife
Dual-edged
In Your
Own Salt
In your own salt I find you
Most convincing
And so I’d like
To look into your failing eyes
And feel your trembling shoulders
To intoxicate myself with the fire
Bur