“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 is frozen, 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 mingled 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 plow the ground And plowed 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 the town that day To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on, And he could wait—we’d see to him to-morrow. 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, unworn out, or undisposed of. It wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad About his telescope. Beyond the age Of being given one’s gift for Christmas, He had to take the best way he knew how To find himself in one. Well, all we said was He took a strange thing to be roguish over.