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