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.

Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium"  from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.  Copyright © 1971 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.. Source: The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 ( W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002 ) Please note: We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over email, but certain email clients may distort how character indent, line wraps, and fonts appear.