By Adrienne Rich:
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), 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 thema woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’in her 98 years to discover
8 cometsShe whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lensesGalaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilledin those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVAevery impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of usTycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’What we see, we see
and seeing is changingthe light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man aliveHeartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my bodyThe radio impulse
pouring in from TaurusI 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.
This is fun, I may just turn this into a poetry blog.