Arrondissements

The Weekend Curfew After the weekend curfew Celan found the house shuttered the parents in captivity himself condemned to being enemy of himself. His Todesfuge began. Later that lyric was, for many years, an urn carried in German ceremonies of forgetfulness disguised as memory. And so Celan smashed it with his intellect's hammer. For Nazi cruelty in its purist light had filled that lyric, a vessel of the Sephiroth, and when the hammer broke it musical fragments became shards, part of the song went hiding silent in stones, dark rising past the secretly-glowing stones on ashheaps, words that each whip stroke cracked open in savage light. And we, we'd emulate this, letting our lyrics croak the throat into broken music as if mere self-unease were our righteousness smashing the lyric vessel in darkness so to be as smart as he was oh to be as smart as he was our words nowhere near bursting with such a lesser weight of light, as we flip through the fragments of our cheque book stubs.Oliver, Douglas is the author of 'Arrondissements' with ISBN 9781844710195 and ISBN 184471019X.