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Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose. Remain remain propose repose chose. I call carelessly that the door is open Which if they may refuse to open No one can rush to close. Let them be mine therefor. Everybody knows that I chose. Therefor if therefore before I close. I will therefore offer therefore I offer this. Which if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine. I will be well welcome when I come. Because I am coming. Certainly I come having come. These stanzas are done.

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love! I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss. ’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, Love visited a Grecian maid, Till she disturbed the sacred spell, And woke to find her hopes betrayed. But gentle sleep shall veil my sight, And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be, When, in the visions of the night, Thou dost renew thy vows to me. Then come to me in dreams, my love, I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light, Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's. I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone,— The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned— Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround— Smiling they live, and call life pleasure; To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan; They might lament—for I am one Whom men love not,—and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

All the way north on the train the sun followed me followed me without moving still the sun of that other morning when we had gone over Come on over men at the screen door said to my father You have to see this it’s an ape bring the little boy bring the boy along so he brought me along to the field of dry grass hissing behind the houses in the heat that morning and there was nothing else back there but the empty day above the grass waving as far away as I could see and the sight burned my eyes white birds were flying off beyond us and a raised floor of boards like a house with no house on it part way out there was shining by itself a color of shadow and the voices of the men were smaller in the field as we walked on something was standing out there on the floor the men kept saying Come on over it’s on a chain and my father said to me Don’t get too close I saw it was staring down at each of our faces one after the other as though it might catch sight of something in one of them that it remembered I stood watching its eyes as they turned away from each of us

Star light, star bright, First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have this wish I wish tonight.

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain, a child was born in a cave in order to save the world; it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart. To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away— from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare. December 1987

"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 lifelong 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 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, 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 for Christmas gift, 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 stargazing. 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 it 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?

TWINKLE, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are ! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the trav'ller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often thro' my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. 'Tis your bright and tiny spark, Lights the trav'ller in the dark : Tho' I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

Whatever ’tis, whose beauty here below Attracts thee thus and makes thee stream and flow, And wind and curl, and wink and smile, Shifting thy gate and guile; Though thy close commerce nought at all imbars My present search, for eagles eye not stars, And still the lesser by the best And highest good is blest; Yet, seeing all things that subsist and be, Have their commissions from divinity, And teach us duty, I will see What man may learn from thee. First, I am sure, the subject so respected Is well dispos’d, for bodies once infected, Deprav’d, or dead, can have with thee No hold, nor sympathy. Next, there’s in it a restless, pure desire And longing for thy bright and vital fire, Desire that never will be quench’d, Nor can be writh’d, nor wrench’d. These are the magnets which so strongly move And work all night upon thy light and love, As beauteous shapes, we know not why, Command and guide the eye. For where desire, celestial, pure desire Hath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire, There God a commerce states, and sheds His secret on their heads. This is the heart he craves, and who so will But give it him, and grudge not, he shall feel That God is true, as herbs unseen Put on their youth and green.

You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning. You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea. Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way. You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter. It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer. And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear. From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.