Across the Sky
I only just found out that Adrienne Rich died in March. She is has always been one of my favorite poets. This post is for her.
Planetarium
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Adrienne Rich
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a
monster
a monster in the shape of a
woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and
instruments
or measuring the ground with
poles’
in her 98 years to
discover
8 comets
she whom the moon
ruled
like us
levitating into the night
sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for
impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and
absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of
Uranusborg
encountering
the NOVA
every impulse of light
exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering
at last
‘Let me not seem
to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a
mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded
yet I stand
I have been standing all my
life in the
direct path of a battery of
signals
the most accurately
transmitted most
untranslatable language in the
universe
I am a galactic cloud so
deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could
take 15
years to travel through
me And has
taken I am an instrument
in the shape
of a woman trying to translate
pulsations
into images for the relief
of the body
and the reconstruction of the
mind.
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