Planetarium

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 Uraniborg

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

untranslateable 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.