You Will Always Be
Untamable
- Poems
-
Translated by Richard
Hacken
From Galsan Tschinag, Nimmer
werde ich Dich zähmen können
(Frauenfeld, Switzerland: Waldgut Verlag, 1996)
Return to: The Poetry of Galsan Tschinag
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
Burning in you and meant for me
At some point, I know
Your heart will explode
And in its worn-out scraps
My callousness will find its nest
Then calm will finally enter in
At this breast
The cemetery plot of our love
I know it, know it
Love Is A Fairytale
Love is a fairytale
That I can tell you with some skill
You are the lone character in it
For you are the loveliest, the richest, most
magnificent
And so from this hour you are the axis
Around which the earth will turn
Love will be your water and bread
To serve as sustenance
And as the steed
That carries you past planets
But now and then also
The storm wind twirling you in circles
And flinging you through the mill
Where salt is ground
Into the wounds
That you in your arrogance
Imposed
On the world and on yourself
And since love is just a fairytale
Everything I say will be true
When The Night of Love Has Burned Away
When the night of love has burned away
Its paths of light float
Above the intersection
Of departing and arriving dreams
Seeking
To illuminate irregularities
In the coarse fibers of daylight
Two humans go
Smiling through the hours
To live awaiting night
They are two fountains
Filling to the brim
And coming together
As streams
Under the evening star
In order to flow once more through the night
As a river united
And to have their waves
Crescendo
To sparks and flames
May My
Words Like Hailstones
May my words
Beat on you like hailstones
Precipitated by a helpless rage
I will never forgive
The transgression
Jutting from your shore
Impossible to eradicate as a rock
The current has carried off
The raft
Tears that flow from your cheeks
To my chest
Just form a salty puddle there
The creation of our world
Is complete
Neither the garden path
Nor the great happiness
Are ever going to be
The Hilly
Shouldered Steppe
I dreamed again of the hilly shouldered
Steppe with its surging sea of grass
But once again lost my way
I searched for the yurts
For the swans and you and me
But found only the land
Yawning void with emptiness again
Now covered with frost
The multibillion pebbles
Sparkled like frozen tears
And more than one shattered and crumbled
Under the unaccustomed weight
Of me
I knew the yurts
Had moved on to the mountain valleys
The swans had flown south
And you and I had been
Overtaken by time
And had
Proceeded
Down the well-known track
Of life
My Gift To You Will Be A Yurt
My gift to you will be a yurt
Where togetherness lives
Of love it will be spun
Of my bright and quiet love
Within it you shall spend days
To make you pregnant with dreams
And within you shall experience nights
To give them birth
My entry place will be a yurt
Where togetherness lives
Of love it will be spun
Of our bright and quiet love
When The Hour Was Late
When the hour was late
I stepped
Across bright snow
Shoved
The night aside
Sliced
The meadow in two
Stepped
Up to you
My wakeful harbor
My waiting hearth
Possessed
By You
Possessed by you
I counter time's chronology
Stripping off the suffocating annual rings
From my body
As I would clothing at night
Growing backward toward toddler tongues
Pushing toward the earliest edge
With an inner mountain boy's sacred simplicity
That I choked off
In dust on the path to the top
But now you, water of life
From twin fountains
Solar-rounded, heavenly blue
Alive once more
One Hour
You've Been Gone
One hour you've been gone
And now our bed
Our warm bed is growing cold
Why take the warmth with you?
Why leave me lone as an orphan child?
Why give me over to bald, clammy walls
And a ticking, teasing clock?
How empty and endless the room
That used to be so close fitting
Without the large all-seeing eyes
And the quick all-reaching arms
How stale the air without your scent
That maddening mix of chemistry and onions
How empty and heavy my head
Without the proper shoulder for it
To lean against and send a bright swarm
Of thoughts into the universe
You
You
Wind of my heart
You
Light of my eyes
You
Sky for my head
And earth for my feet
Even you will betray me someday
You will, since everyone does
Just as anyone who eats and drinks
Is irritated by hunger and thirst
But later with a full stomach
Glances with benevolence again
At his own plate
And at people waiting around other plates
On this earth betrayal simply happens
Like birth and death
And in between
Racing against the moment
Breathing
So you will
Betray me one day
Just as you eat and drink and breathe
Just as I will betray you
Before that happens, though,
The wonder happening between you and me
Lasting almost into the second winter
Will have to leave us
So that we can once again be
Worldly and human
Filled
With You
Filled with you
I stepped out into the morning fog
Began slitting open the lurking winter
For hours on end
Starting at the closest corner
Its ferocious skin, its numbing air
Marching on
Up to the eleventh of December
I knew
Your warmth will accompany me
To the end of all planets
And ages
Without
Birds
Without birds
Without sky
The day dozes
Within itself again
The fog hanging
For the second straight week
Has oppressed autumn
And has begun
To sour
I too live
Empty and sour
Standing dumbly
Before the script
That is you
That is all of a sudden
No longer legible
My Life
My life is
Like your bed-sheet
Stained and frayed
The smirking traces
Of others' cravings
Etch my soul
Murderously
I need to guard myself
From the after-pains
Of games completed
In which your body
Was the playing field
The First
Cluster
The first cluster
Of sharp-cornered rays
From the rising sun
Leaps in my direction
Dashes into the stream
And flows away
For a second
I live in dread:
I could be the one
To drown
In you
My young and heavy happiness
The Storm
Wind Has Been Shaking
The storm wind has been shaking
The mountains
Who knows how many days
Grass and shrub
Cower and clutch tightly
To the sinews of the soil
You've held your stand in me
Who knows how many years
Giving way to nobody
Defending your position
The birds migrate
Return
Again and again
The tear you shed
In a wretched hour
Has yet to drop
From your eyelash
The
Coastline
The coastline
Where you and I
Were lifted from earth's heaviness
And tossed back to ourselves
Now lies
Torn apart
Shrieking gulls
Are no substitute
For the crashing waves
That poured out
Over the depths
At the hour our sane
Sacred world broke in two
Happiness demands payment
One
Hundred Thousand Red-Breasted Geese
One hundred thousand red-breasted geese
Sweep away
Across the steppe
Combing the grass and clouds
In a single direction
Their wind
Splits against mine
As it breaks through
The gathering winter
Along my spine
And marrow pulsating
Rushing to you
My summer
In the cold north
Your Fingers and Mine
Your fingers and mine
Reached for each other
A yurt of ten fingers
That housed our love
Lay between us
The years have
Swept away the yurt
Two fists
Now defend
The fortress
Where we
Live our selves
Storms Have
Raged
Storms have raged
In this one autumn
As never
In all the years before
Devastation
On your side and mine
We both stand
Like skeletons
Laid bare
To the core
No riddles
No more promises
To each other
Worlds
Created differently and
Mutually unrewarding
We stand
On separate hills
Do You
Sense
Do you sense
The light, gentle vibrations?
They are my wind currents
Sneaking around you
Fiber by fiber
They peel away
The skin
Hiding you from me
Each hair-breadth
That they expose
I quickly cover over
With me
I'm growing
Into your new skin
Parting
Parting
Under the yellow dawn
Has no place for laughter
Better to weep, girl
I'm glad to kiss the tears
From your eyelashes
And to imagine
That you feel as much pain
As I do this hour
At the far end of a sentence
Punctuated by two question marks
Quietly
Quietly
You flew in
And settled
Next to me
Endearing light
So multi-radiant
Like fibers
Running
Along the heart
I saw you
Shining into me
And I felt
All my branches awaken
They stood in rows
And burned
You Were A Log
You were a log
My gray-eyed night
On the fire
Threatening to go out
The drink I hand you
Out of gratitude
Will be salty and full of ash
But it will explain me
To you completely
I'm Cold
I'm cold
The blood has retreated into my heart sac
Before making its way to my veins
The tears have frozen in my throat
Before rising to my eyes
Am I even living my life anymore
When blood and tears
No longer flow?
The storm tide that bowled me over
In the midst of my years
Started in my furrows
It seems I've lived
The life of a prince
Now I'm faced
With that of a dog
In You
In you lie
Dead years
I must not
Dig there
Dead time
Is different
Than dead people
I can still leap up
And create malice
Like A Little
Girl
When you snuggle against me
Like a little girl and tremble
I unfold my landscapes
Above you
To counter the night
Pressing down on you
Too black and too troubled
I rest easier, too
Without wrinkles
And weave the chrysalis of a butterfly
That will flutter across
When the stars extinguish
To settle on your eyelids
In The
Clouds
My place is
In the clouds
Bubbling up behind the mountain
With the swaying woods
The cranes left it for me
As they splintered off the sky
Of our summer
And sailed towards winter
Their call
Was the voice of farewell
Which we've long known in us
Lying in my travel bag
Packed in clothing with your scent
Is the salt
I will use as a lick
While I migrate on
To a new nest
Water
Priceless
Water priceless
Wood priceless
Words priceless
I grew heavily
Out of the stony desert ground
Between mountains
My tongue and teeth developed
To squelch all squandering
Now I peel myself away
In words
Antidote
To the poison
Found in the primeval milk
Whose way I follow
My scarce and weighty word
Is now on its way to you
The Pill
I have swallowed
The pill of unforgettable
The hours you and I
Spent in the hollow of lunacy
Lie inside me
Like boulder scree from
the steppe
Abiding
To stave off all who wish
To take your place
Now I Must
Live
Now I must live
Without even the
Black hawk
The light storms
Of the sinking day
Have come
To flood the emptiness
That those hawks
Have left behind
In the broiling rings of sun
The thought of summer
Paralyzes
Your image from me
It has moved on again
The distance of one lasso-throw
Under the bird-weary clouds
Behind the furrowed mount
I know the hour
That will come
And release me
The
Swallows Have Flown Out
The swallows have flown out
In my hope of reaching you
Their imprints are stamped
Into the sky
Like border stakes between you and me
At the point where they end
May the sky of our summer
Continue on undivided
Onto Your
Warm White Skin
The moonlight dribbled
Onto your warm white skin
And sloshed its way across to me
Behind us
Stood an invisible shadow
Guarding each and all
Like a dividing wall
Our innocent night
Lay between light and dark
Your Mountains
Your mountains
Were witnesses to my cowardice
I am scratched
Into their memory
Of stone
Now they raise
Their clenched fists
Straight across my path
How can I ever
Still their rage?
The
Wave-Patterned Countenance Of The Steppe
The wave-patterned countenance of the steppe
Tells me of ages
When I was wind
Romping with the first forces
So many outbursts of the elements
Now lie at my feet
Tempered into stone
Polished round as eyes
And my spent forces
Rest, trans-colored and trans-formed
Waiting for the hour
When it arrives
They will disentangle me
And with me bundle up again
The scattering parts
And thus the threshold
That opened for the length of a dream
Will once again fall shut