Saturday, March 31, 2012


g a l a x i e s o f w o m e n


Planetarium

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 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.

Sunday, March 11, 2012



It must have been Saturn and the other old men
Who arranged this night of darkness for us.
So much of our life goes by in the murky dark.

- from The Night the Cities Burned, by Robert Bly.

When a poem takes me to that place where
No story ever happens twice, all I want
Is a warm room, and a thousand years of thought.

- from the poem Shabistari and the Secret Garden, by Robert Bly