For the Conjunction of Two Planets

We smile at astrological hopes
And leave the sky to expert men
Who do not reckon horoscopes
But painfully extend their ken
In mathematical debate
With slide and photographic plate


And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The Medieval man who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.


Whatever register or law
Is drawn in digits for these two
Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,
Wardens of brilliance, as they do
Their dual circuit of the west --
The brightest planet and her guest.


Is any light so proudly thrust
From darkness on our lifted faces
A sign of something we can trust,
Or is it that in starry places
We see the things we long to see
In fiery iconography ?

Adrienne Cecile Rich

Orion

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young


my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride


and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it ;
as I throw back my head to take you in
and old transfusion happens again :
divine astronomy is nothing to it.


Indoors I bruise and blunder
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.


A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman's head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.


Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate !
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back


it's with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do least damage.
Breath deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.

Adrienne Cecile Rich

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 Uranisborg
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

Adrienne Cecile Rich, 1971

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