Artichokes, 
- Artichokes, and One of Many Moments
Artichokes
Best to peel them with your thumb, The spiny leaves of this covert fruit, Wrapped tightly ’round a distaff, Dragon scales, softer, more tender As you reach the innermost heart, Hidden by the tiny hairs of the choke.
A basket full of heads at the market, Rich harvest of the guillotine. Necks Cut on long stalks like the throats of Honey-glazed geese in China. There they are: The shrunken heads of extraterrestrial Warriors, green chalices, stripped In search of the flesh, the meat, Armored umbels on their stem.
The French ones are huge, carved In stone, the pride of the parapets At the Versailles Orangery, The Roman ones, smaller, without Thorns, they cleave to your palate Like a band of Mafiosi To their bloody clan. [End Page 41]
One of Many Moments
Dolorossa, Assunta, Concetta . . . An ambulance races past the tables At the street café and all the dogs In the district start to whine. Silence falls in the old people’s homes, An icy silence acknowledged by waiters And flower-sellers with a grin. The would-be beggars melt away, One guy floats off as if drawn by a thread.
That was the city as it is—on the day That everything comes to pass: they do exist The luminous frescos in ancient churches, Madonnas in dismal funerary chapels. The clouds rimmed with gold, The swallows soaring in the updraft. The bones, the cold, the chalk— But there will be no resurrection.
The scooters weave through the traffic Governed by some covert choreography. The shop windows reflect the very same scenes Tomorrow and yesterday. The usual suspects Standing at street corners. No matter what happens, All of it, all of it is back in place. Just a few girls shrieking, but Not because of this, not this. [End Page 42]
Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden, has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Suhrkamp, 2014) and the volume of memoirs Die Jahre im Zoo: Ein Kaleidoskop (Suhrkamp, 2015). His many awards include the Georg Büchner Prize (1994), Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Great Cross of Merit with Star (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). He lives in Berlin and Rome.
Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. Recent publications include Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (Seagull Books, 2014), with David Constantine, which was commended for the Popescu Poetry Prize in 2015, and the edited collection Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her translations of Durs Grünbein have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry. She was awarded the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013, an English PEN award, and an American PEN/Heim award in 2016.
note
Chosce, the Sicilian expression for the leaves of the artichoke, is also a synonym for the members of a mafia clan.
