“The Mechanic’s Magazine,” Volume 57, redacted into a poem. The graphic hiding the text in the left column is a figure showing asteroid distances from the sun (from Percival Lowell’s “Saturn’s Rings: A Memoir.”)
From “Old and New Astronomy” by Richard Anthony Proctor and Arthur Cowper Ranyard (1892).
What was your role
on that summer night
when the blanket
on the lawn
was drenched
to the last thread
in honeysuckle
and we looked up
at a full moon
and didn’t see you
so locked
in the moment
and staring away
from Earth
turning a blind eye
on a stolen kiss
the hidden chaperone
looking away
for us.
A page of John Burroughs’ “Accepting the Universe” (1920) redacted into a poem.
Sleep
in this can
on this sargasso sea
between the unmarked
continents
sleep
on this bed
of nothing
while the sun
rushes in
through the window
to fill the ballast
then retreats
and the black
beneath your wake
stirs
and brightens
and thin currents
steer you
home.
_______________________
Image: The first American to sleep in space, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, describes sleep in his astronaut self-briefing. (From NASA’s “Postlaunch Memorandum Report for Mercury-Atlas No. 9 [MA-9].”)
Ernst Mach’s 1888 photograph of bow shock waves around a supersonic brass bullet. The clipped words pasted onto the photo are from Mach’s “Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations” (1910).
A haiku for Oberon written on an art postcard. The “stamp” in the upper right corner is a Voyager 2 image of Uranus’ moon, Oberon, taken in 1986. Image credit: NASA/JPL. The handwritten title at left was a note written inside a book cover.
A page of a typography article redacted. The article is Everett R. Currier’s 1920 “The Origin and Use of Swash Letters” from “The Printing Art,” Volume XXXIV. The inset image of a “spiral nebula” is from J. Norman Lockyer’s 1871 “The Elements of Astronomy.”
