We've come so far, thought the astronaut as he swam around the capsule in his third week and by accident kicked a god in the eye —so far that there's no difference anymore between up and down, north and south, heavy and light. And how, then, can we know righteousness. So far. And weightless, in a sealed room we chase the sunrises at high speed and sicken with longing for a green stalk or the heft of something in our hands. Lifting a stone. One night he saw that the Earth was like an open eye that looked at him as gravely as the eye of a child awakened in the middle of the night.
From North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, translated and edited by Roger Greenwald. Translation © 2002 by Roger Greenwald. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.