With a Moon in Transit (1996)
“Marked by an inimitable anecdotal expansiveness and uncompromising control, Jacqueline Osherow’s poems are among the most ambitious being written . . . I am always deeply absorbed when I read Osherow’s work, and I never fail to be exhilarated by its scope, its narrative ease, its good-natured and probing intelligence.” —Mark Strand
Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy
Somebody ought to write a poem for Ptolemy,
So ingenious in being wrong, he was almost a poet.
Can anyone follow his configurations?
How he cut a tortured path for every planet
Until his numbers matched what he could see,
Every one spectacularly wrong.
You would think, in all those years of calculations,
He would, at least, have suspected a simpler way,
Maybe he even knew it all along—
The stationary sun, ellipses, everything—
But kept it to himself as too unseemly
Or to save his pregnant wife from all that spinning
And wait beside her in a quiet place
That he, himself, had rendered motionless.