EXALTATIONS IN SLEEP Poem by Durs Grünbein

How deep we sink when the light goes out
and the heaviness falls from our shoulders.

Like that the armour that fell from the weary knight,
who'd fought so long in the danse macabre.

Hoc corpus meum. Under cover of night
he's caught up in himself, free in dreams, chained.

Of all life's states the most extreme is sleep,
it envelops, overwhelms, leaves us behind.

Extreme: in sleep we struggle with our dreams,
like Don Quixote, until the body finds its rest.

In sleep, how many positions do we assume?
the foetus, the crucified, Laocoön, Holy Shiva.

Lying stiffly on my back, it comes to me -
‘Once I was a tapir, on the banks of the Orinoco'.