“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.”

“PLANETARIUMThinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)astronomer, sister of William; and others.A woman in the shape of a monstera monster in the shape of a womanthe skies are full of thema woman ‘in the snowamong the Clocks and instrumentsor measuring the ground with poles’in her 98 years to discover8 cometsshe whom the moon ruledlike uslevitating into the night skyriding the polished lensesGalaxies of women, theredoing penance for impetuousnessribs chilledin those spaces of the mindAn eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVAevery impulse of light explodingfrom the coreas life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’What we see, we seeand seeing is changingthe light that shrivels a mountainand leaves a man aliveHeartbeat of the pulsarheart sweating through my bodyThe radio impulsepouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I standI have been standing all my life in thedirect path of a battery of signalsthe most accurately transmitted mostuntranslatable language in the universeI am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-luted that a light wave could take 15years to travel through me And hastaken I am an instrument in the shapeof a woman trying to translate pulsationsinto images for the relief of the bodyand the reconstruction of the mind.”

“Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,..”

“Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense...”

“He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.”

“It is the image in the mind that links us to our lost treasures; but it is the loss that shapes the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.”