"You know Orion always comes
up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our
fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands,
he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light
with something
I should have done by daylight,
and indeed,
After the ground if froze,
I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust
flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky
lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of
doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having
caught me.
Has a man, I should like
to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged
to pay respect to?"
So Brad McLaughlin mingle
reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger
farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger
farming,
He burned his house down
for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on
a telescope
To satisfy a life-long curiosity
About our place among the
infinities.
"What do you want with one
of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand.
"Don't you get one!"
"Don't call it blamed; there
isn't anything
More blameless in the sense
of being less
A weapon in our human fight,"
he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my
farm to buy it."
There where he moved the
rocks to plough the ground
And ploughed between the
rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands;
so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and
then not selling,
He burned his house down
for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope
with what it came to.
He had been heard to say
by several:
"The best thing that we're
put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's
given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every
town
Seems to me owes it to the
town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well
be me."
After such loose talk it was
no surprise
When he did what he did and
burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about
town that day
To let him know we weren't
the least imposed on,
And he could wait---we'd
see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next
morning we reflected
If one by one we counted
people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't
take us long
To get so we had no one left
to live with.
For to be social is to be
forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does
our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming
to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to
him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back,
that is if still
Uneaten, unwornout, or undisposed
of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard
on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond
the age
Of being given one for a
Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way
he know how
To find himself in one. Well,
all we said was
He took a strange thing to
be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted
on the house,
A good old-timer dating back
along;
But a house isn't sentient;
the house
Didn't feel anything. And
if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice
by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned
one at auction?
Out of a house and so out
of a farm
At a stroke (of a match),
Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord
railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at
a station
Where his job, when he wasn't
selling tickets,
Was setting out up track
and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets,
evening stars
That varied in their hue
from red to green.
He got a good glass for six
hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure
for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and
have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet
black inside,
At a star quaking in the
other end.
I recollect a night of broken
clouds
And underfoot snow melted
down to ice,
And melting further in the
wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the
telescope.
We spread our two legs as
we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the
way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure
till the day broke,
Said some of the best things
we ever said.
That telescope was christened
the Star-splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing
but split
A star in two or three the
way you split
A globule of quicksilver
in your hand
With one stroke of your finger
in the middle.
It's a star splitter if there
ever was one
And ought to do some good
if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared
with splitting wood.
We've looked and looked,
but after all, where are we?
Do we know any better where
we are,
And how it stands between
the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern
chimney?
How different from the way
it ever stood?"