Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
By Adrienne Rich
It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die
walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something
more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary
but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time
into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous
—beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death
or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction
beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room
These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens
they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze
of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them
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I had so much to catch up on Tuesday and only barely made a dent! I put off answering lots of emails, sorting lots of photos, and doing lots of laundry while son was here, plus I brought back a lot of photos and papers from my in-laws to scan and I haven't even taken those out of boxes yet. It was quite cold, so the melted snow had frozen on the woods paths and we had to walk on the better-scraped sidewalks.
My Voyager group watched "Alter Ego" which is an awful episode except Janeway and Chakotay dressed for a luau (they got leied). Then we finally watched Doctor Who's "Eve of the Daleks" which was okay -- some fun moments, nice character stuff, I liked it better than most of last season. When we dropped Daniel off at Dulles, we were happy to see that they had an exhibit on the Hubble telescope:
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