Title: Sport 40: 2012

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2014, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 40: 2012

Durs Grünbein

page 272

Durs Grünbein

Astronaut in October

He was far out, for weeks, in zero gravity,
Never at home amidst the cables and the modules.
A hamster in the space station’s billion-dollar wheel,
Propelled by one word only: mission, mission.

Now he returns into the world just as it is. Worn out,
And not a bit superior to the world he left.
A giant drain for every form of knowledge, goodness,
A trouble spot with five unequal continents, and islands
In a sea that couldn’t care less about life on the mainland.

Still breathing down his neck the emptiness of those cold spaces,
He’s warmed by an October day. He feels relieved and free
Down here, in front of ground control, the telescopes.
He takes a short-cut home, straight through the fields.

page 273

Infanta in the Gravel Shower

Forget the tulip bed, its blinding red explosion,
The rain of debris in the green, the shrapnel
Of spattering carmine. Here come
The haptic joys: the gravel path’s gravel,
The drizzle of pebbles through the finger sieve.
The infanta is she, and the park is all hers.

Take the lorgnons from your eyes. No longer
Marvel at boscages and boxwood beasts
Hunting in sunlight. For she has awoken—
And knows what to do: collecting and weighing
The pebbles, with her left hand, her right,
As though counting beans. Then it bursts out!
She throws up her arms, the sky rips asunder,
In a twitter of sparrows. With eyes all asparkle
She sits in the gravel shower laughing and laughing.

© Durs Grünbein, 2012. English translations © Michael Eskin, 2012.