Monday Poems: "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 was a prolific and critically-acclaimed American poet who published over two dozen poetry collections, among them Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2010), The School Among the Ruins (2004), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), The Fact of a Doorframe (1984) (in which the above poem can be found). She also wrote nonfiction, including Bread, Blood and Poetry (1986) and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), and was an outspoken feminist and lesbian activist.

Among her many honors, Rich received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She also served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1997, Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in protest against the House of Representatives’ vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts and other anti-art policies of the Clinton Administration. For the last three decades, Rich lived in Santa Cruz, CA, and taught at Scripps University and Stanford University, among others. She passed away on March 27, 2012.