Thursday, December 3, 2009

HUBBLE THURSDAY 3 DECEMBER 2009


(Nearby Galaxy Centaurus A)

Every Thursday, I post a very large photograph of some corner of space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and available online from the picture album at HubbleSite, followed by poetry after the jump.

This reminds me a joke popular among my friends in the 70s:
Q: What's white and streaks across the sky?
A: The coming of the Lord.


DIAGNOSIS

by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

1 comment:

Jesse Wendel said...

*laughs and laughs*

That CRACKS me up.

Somehow it reminds me of Larry Niven's famous short story: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

Not sure if the story should have a trigger warning on it or not. Um, NSFW in a Text Mode. A frank and uninhibited conversation on the difficulties Superman and any women in his life -- or any city nearby -- might encounter when it comes to sex.