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.

— ‘Planetarium’, Adrienne Rich, 1968