I'm going to start with a poem called "Planetarium," which
is thinking of Caroline Herschel, who
was the sister of the astronomer William Herschel,
of Herschel's comet, who herself was
a no mean sighter of comets, and who
worked with him throughout his life, and until her own death.
And when I wrote this poem, I wasn't aware
that there had been other women astronomers--
Maria Mitchell, one of them.
I always had a kind of yen for astronomy, myself,
and used to spend a lot of time reading
lay works on astronomy at one point in my life.
And this poem, in a sense, comes out of that.
There is a quotation in the poem from Tycho Brahe,
the Danish astronomer, who said that his observations were
'virile, precise, and absolutely certain."
"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 eight 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 involuted,
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."