Commissions

Planetarium, 2009
Stancill Stoneware, Porcelain, Basalt
96" x 72" x 3"
For MJ, Washington, DC

(check it out in Washington Home and Design, Spring 2011)

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.