And burning to yield flowers instead of grain, Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar, He loaded an old stone-boat with the star And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce More practical than Pegasus the horse If it could put a star back in its course.

He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a pace But faintly reminiscent of the race Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though Commanded in a dream, forever go To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well, I do not know—​I cannot stop to tell: He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye Except at night to places in the sky Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church, And why they seek it there; for what I search I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

Sure that though not a star of death and birth, So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin, It yet has poles, and only needs a spin To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm And run off in strange tangents with my arm As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize Of the one world complete in any size That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

THE CENSUS-TAKER

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women (It never had been dwelt in, though, by women, So what is this I make a sorrow of?) I came as census-taker to the waste To count the people in it and found none, None in the hundred miles, none in the house, Where I came last with some hope, but not much After hours' overlooking from the cliffs An emptiness flayed to the very stone. I found no people that dared show themselves, None not in hiding from the outward eye. The time was autumn, but how anyone Could tell the time of year when every tree That could have dropped a leaf was down itself And nothing but the stump of it was left Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch; And every tree up stood a rotting trunk Without a single leaf to spend on autumn, Or branch to whistle after what was spent. Perhaps the wind the more without the help Of breathing trees said something of the time Of year or day the way it swung a door Forever off the latch, as if rude men Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him For the next one to open for himself. I counted nine I had no right to count (But this was dreamy unofficial counting) Before I made the tenth across the threshold. Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s? No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table. The stove was cold—​the stove was off the chimney-- And down by one side where it lacked a leg. The people that had loudly passed the door Were people to the ear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men there. I armed myself against such bones as might be With the pitch-blackened stub of an axe-handle I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor. Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled. The door was still because I held it shut While I thought what to do that could be done-- About the house—​about the people not there. This house in one year fallen to decay Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe. Nothing was left to do that I could see Unless to find that there was no one there And declare to the cliffs too far for echo "The place is desert and let whoso lurks In silence, if in this he is aggrieved, Break silence now or be forever silent. Let him say why it should not be declared so." The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living.

THE STAR-SPLITTER

"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.

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 one 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.[19] 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 to-night And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?

MAPLE

Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabel Made Maple first take notice of her name. She asked her father and he told her "Maple-- Maple is right." "But teacher told the school There’s no such name." "Teachers don’t know as much As fathers about children, you tell teacher. You tell her that it’s M-A-P-L-E. You ask her if she knows a maple tree. Well, you were named after a maple tree. Your mother named you. You and she just saw Each other in passing in the room upstairs, One coming this way into life, and one Going the other out of life—​you know? So you can’t have much recollection of her. She had been having a long look at you. She put her finger in your cheek so hard It must have made your dimple there, and said, 'Maple.' I said it too: 'Yes, for her name.' She nodded. So we’re sure there’s no mistake. I don’t know what she wanted it to mean, But it seems like some word she left to bid you Be a good girl—​be like a maple tree. How like a maple tree’s for us to guess. Or for a little girl to guess sometime. Not now—​at least I shouldn’t try too hard now. By and by I will tell you all I know About the different trees, and something, too, About your mother that perhaps may help." Dangerous self-arousing words to sow. Luckily all she wanted of her name then Was to rebuke her teacher with it next day, And give the teacher a scare as from her father. Anything further had been wasted on her, Or so he tried to think to avoid blame. She would forget it. She all but forgot it. What he sowed with her slept so long a sleep, And came so near death in the dark of years, That when it woke and came to life again The flower was different from the parent seed. It came back vaguely at the glass one day, As she stood saying her name over aloud, Striking it gently across her lowered eyes To make it go well with the way she looked. What was it about her name? Its strangeness lay In having too much meaning. Other names, As Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie, Signified nothing. Rose could have a meaning, But hadn’t as it went. (She knew a Rose.) This difference from other names it was Made people notice it—​and notice her. (They either noticed it, or got it wrong.) Her problem was to find out what it asked In dress or manner of the girl who bore it. If she could form some notion of her mother-- What she had thought was lovely, and what good. This was her mother’s childhood home; The house one story high in front, three stories On the end it presented to the road. (The arrangement made a pleasant sunny cellar.) Her mother’s bedroom was her father’s still, Where she could watch her mother’s picture fading. Once she found for a bookmark in the Bible A maple leaf she thought must have been laid In wait for her there. She read every word Of the two pages it was pressed between As if it was her mother speaking to her. But forgot to put the leaf back in closing And lost the place never to read again. She was sure, though, there had been nothing in it.

So she looked for herself, as everyone Looks for himself, more or less outwardly. And her self-seeking, fitful though it was, May still have been what led her on to read, And think a little, and get some city schooling. She learned shorthand, whatever shorthand may Have had to do with it—​she sometimes wondered. So, till she found herself in a strange place For the name Maple to have brought her to, Taking dictation on a paper pad, And in the pauses when she raised her eyes Watching out of a nineteenth story window An airship laboring with unship-like motion And a vague all-disturbing roar above the river Beyond the highest city built with hands. Someone was saying in such natural tones She almost wrote the words down on her knee, "Do you know you remind me of a tree-- A maple tree?" "Because my name is Maple?"