Girl Hours
[by Sofia Samatar, originally published in Stone Telling]
Conclusion
You were not the only deaf woman there.
Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.
On the day of your death she wrote: Rainy day pouring at night.
Oh bright rain, brave clouds, oh stars,
oh stars.
Two thousand four hundred fires
and uncharted, unstudied,
the hours, the hours, the hours.
Body
The body is a computer.
The body has two eyes. For the body, the process of triangulation is automatic. The body can see the red steeple of the church beyond the trees. Blackbirds unfold as they grow nearer, like messages.
The body never intended to be a secret.
The body was called a shining cloud, and then a galaxy. The body comforted mariners, spilt milk in the southern sky. The body was thought to be only 30,000 light years away.
The body is untrustworthy. It falls ill.
The thought of uncompleted work, particularly of
the Standard Magnitudes, is one I have had to
avoid as much as possible, as it has had a bad
effect nervously.
The body sits at a desk. A high collar, faint stripes in the white blouse. In this rare photograph, the body is framed in light. The gaze is turned down, the hand poised to make a mark. The body says: “Take photographs, write poems. I will go on with my work.”
The body is not always the same, the body varies in brightness, its true brightness may be ascertained from the rhythm of its pulsing, the body is more remote than we imagined, it eats, it walks, it traverses with terrible slowness the distance between Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the body is stubborn, snowbound, the body has disappeared, the body has left the country, the body has traveled to Europe and will not say if it went there alone, the body is generous, dedicated, seated again, reserved, exacting,
brushed and buttoned, smelling of healthy soap,
and not allowed to touch the telescope.
The body gives time away with both hands.
The body, when working, does not know that time has passed.
The body died in 1921.
The body’s edges are so far from one another that it is hardly a body at all. We gather the stars, and we call them a body. Cygnus. The Swan.
Introduction
Twelve o'clock.
My husband and children asleep.
To chart one more star, to go on working:
this is a way of keeping faith.
Draw me a map.
Show me how to read music.
Teach me to rise without standing,
to hold the galaxy’s calipers
with the earth at one gleaming tip,
to live vastly and with precision,
to travel
where distance is no longer measured in miles but in lifetimes,
in epochs, in breaths, in light years, in girl hours.Sofia Samatar
(via medusasstory)
