Poem: ‘Love Letter from Photograph 51’

Poem: ‘Love Letter from Photograph 51’

By Faith Paulsen edited by Dava Sobel & Clara Moskowitz

“[c]learly Rosy had to go or be put in
her place…. The thought could not be
avoided that the best home for a feminist
was in another person’s lab.”
   —James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)

I’m the picture, that ultimate clue.
I do know solely this lab, the place gentle can simmer for days,
coaxing shadows to slowly outline
the tiny drop you tip so fastidiously
onto the tip of a twisted paperclip.

The lab, and also you, squinting into the lens
of a machine you developed—
hydrogen gasoline pumped by a salt resolution—
on the fulcrum between query and discovery.

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In the lab, the boys name you names, mock your garments,
your moods, your lips, unpainted.

Your delight, your selection of gardenia
is science.

Not on the primary however the fifty-first iteration,
I come to you
within the honey of crystallography
amid x-rays splattered off a fiber of moist DNA
like a tadpole on a sliver of glass.

I swim up, rapt, to visibility.
I whisper my secret solely to you,
the clue, first phrase of the natural story.
The historical code-script
pinned down eventually—
The recipe for whale music
and peacock feathers
earlobe and pea plant, X and Y.

I repair my focus in your eyes, Rose Franklin.
I your discovery. You my laureate.

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