Smoke from This Altar (1990) Read online

  Smoke From This Altar

  Louis L’amour

  *

  Contents:

  INTRODUCTION by Kathy L’Amour xi

  Out of the Ocean Depths Soundlessly Moving

  Smoke From This Altar

  Interlude: Hong kong Harbor Words From a Wanderer

  To Cleone: In Budapest

  I’m a Stranger Here

  Without This Land

  Life

  Biography in Stone

  An Ember In The Dark

  Nocturne

  Wings Over Waves

  A Handful of Stars

  Winter

  Secret Pass

  Banked Fires

  North Cape

  To You, Jeannine

  Decadence

  Love Out of Season

  After Tomorrow

  Yacodhapura

  Steppe

  To Giordano Bruno

  The Weary One

  Hildebrand

  Enchanted Mesas

  My Three Friends

  In An Old Temple

  The Sea, Off Vanua Levu

  If There Is Beauty

  Ship Across The Sky

  McVey

  I Came To Create

  Lines To a Season

  I Shall Go Back

  NEWLY COLLECTED POEMS

  I Haven’t Read Gone With The Wind

  In Protest

  Question

  A Wail From a Pulpeteer

  Old Jerry

  Picture

  Call Of The Tropics

  The Gladiator

  The Pioneer

  Tranquillity

  Twilight

  Forest People

  Winter Winds

  Let It Snow

  Then Came Spring

  Rain

  Mutation

  To One Without Faith

  Rose of Memory

  Let Me Forget

  *

  INTRODUCTION by Kathy L’Amour

  The first book Louis purchased for his own library was The Standard Book of British and American Verse. It was published in 1932 and much used and loved. It is still in our library, now in its second binding. Louis’ love of poetry and the English language was so strong and important in his life that it carried him through many dangerous and lonely days. At the time, poetry was the expression of Louis’ most important thoughts and feelings. It was the first manner in which he wrote about his life, his views and the places he had seen. Some of these poems got published in various newspapers and magazines, and though he made only a few dollars from these sales, they gave him the optimism to keep writing.

  One of his most encouraging moments came in 1936, when he received a letter from George Riley Hall, the editor of the Daily Free-Lance, about his poem, “Banked Fires,” which had just been published in the Daily Oklahoman.

  A section of the letter read: “… The poem is exquisite… . The craftsmanship shows the master workman… . The imagery is all one could ask. The treatment is skilled. The sentiment one that will appeal to millions. There is one line that is worthy of the old masters-‘The arching of a dream across the years.’ A gifted writer might produce a whole volume and not write a line like that.”

  Louis returned to the United States in the late nineteen thirties, after years at sea. He moved in with his parents on a small farm near Choctaw, Oklahoma, that Parker, his brother, had bought for them a few years before. He was thirty years old, and knew that if he was ever going to make something of himself as a writer he had better get started. He began writing short story after short story but they almost always were rejected. I think that he must have felt very tempted to leave again, to go back to the kind of life he had lived before he settled down and forced himself to think about his future. You can feel that wanderlust calling to him in his poems, “I’m a Stranger Here,” “Words From a Wanderer,” and “I Shall Go Back.” He even wrote about putting his old life behind him and facing his future in “Let Me Forget,” the poem that he used to close the Yondering collection.

  Earlier, he had taken a few stabs at poetry. In the beginning he didn’t even know about rhyme and meter. A friend who read some of his attempts in the late twenties told him that “it didn’t scan.” He had no idea what she was talking about, but being Louis, hack to the library he went to read and reread Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Frost, and Service, to discover just what it was that made a great poem.

  During his travels he would occasionally compose poems, and it always seemed remarkable to me that he could both create and then remember them without writing them down; it seemed as if he could never forget a line or even a word. Louis explained that before the development of writing, poetry was one of the tricks ancient people used to remember stories. The rhyme and meter of each line would help you to remember the next. Because of this, poems that told a story, like those of Robert Service, were very popular with the hobos and sailors of his day. They were men with few possessions, some even illiterate, and so they were, in a way, like those ancient people who carried their literature in their heads.

  One night in a ship’s foc’stle, Louis had been trying to work out a particularly romantic poem when several of the other seamen began to tease him about only being able to write “love-stuff.” After several hours of work he presented them with “My Three Friends,” proving that he indeed had other talents.

  When we first began dating, Louis gave me a copy of Smoke From This Altar, and through it I began to learn a little about the man who would become my husband and the father of our children. Many of the poems are about what he saw and thought and felt while he was in China and the South Pacific; others are about places he visited that we went back to together. We drove out to Secret Pass, the subject of a poem in this book, just after we got married. If I remember correctly, it is on the old Hardyville stage road outside of Kingman, Arizona. “Biography In Stone” was written about an outcropping of rock that Louis thought looked slightly like a man; he had become fascinated by it when he was a young man working at the Katherine Mine in the same area. “Enchanted Mesa” was written sixty years ago about what he saw when he first came through the area just west of where we now have our ranch.

  Because he was having little luck with his other writing, Louis decided that he would collect the best of his poetry into a book. He hoped that publishing it would bring him some attention and prestige. A small Oklahoma City publishing company finally agreed to release Smoke From This Altar in 1939. Although not very many copies were sold, the book was well reviewed. Kenneth Kaufman, editor of the book page for the Daily Oklahoman, wrote, “What struck me first was his delight in and love for words; and what struck me next was his industry. He has that infinite capacity for taking pains, which Carlyle, I believe it was, gave as a definition of genius. And he has the ability to take punishment which only a trained fighter (which he is, along with all his other accomplishments) could stand. By which I mean to imply that he will be heard from in a big way one of these days… . For he has the three things which it takes to make a writer: a love for words, industry, and something to say.”

  Because of Smoke From This Altar, Louis was able to move into a different phase as a writer. He began to receive requests to speak, read his poetry, and autograph. He had published his first book, and it served to move his career along. About the same time a few of his short stories sold and he was on his way as a writer of note.

  I’ve decided to add a few poems that weren’t in the original Smoke From This Altar. Some are humorous, some light verse, and some serious and thoughtful. I hope you enjoy them.

  *

  SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR

  OUT OF THE OCEAN DEPTHS SOUNDLESSLY MOVING

>   Out of the ocean depths soundlessly moving Up from the violet unblossoming sea; Out of the vastness

  that strangely disturbing, Troubles my heart

  with mute colloquy;

  Out of the distance

  that holds me enchanted, Up from the green,

  shifting violence below A voice from the twilight, the beauty, the stillness, A voice that comes calling and calling to go.

  Out of the purple along the horizon,

  Up from the endless unchallenged beyond A call that comes whispering, softly, enduring Of ways to go wandering, seas so alluring.

  Out of the ocean depths soundlessly moving Up from my memories disturbing and deep; A spirit that urges me

  restlessly onward,

  A dreaming that haunts me awake and asleep.

  Nothing has life more beautiful than ships Nothing with half their white-winged majesty, Nothing the fancy captures, roving free,

  Can equal cloud-crowned masts or prow that dips Into the waves … no sight can this eclipse … For here has man put wings across the sea, Harnessed the winds to labor, daringly,

  Challenged the gods with brine upon his lips.

  Give us this beauty that will conquer power,

  Give us this strength that will defy the fates . . The creak of wind-whipped rigging for an hour And splendor of the sails … this expiates; Give us this glory … we must not forget, That man is noble, too, in silhouette.

  *

  INTERLUDE: HONGKONG HARBOR

  The harbor lights are shining from the quay Like golden daggers in the heart of night; I stand below the lonely anchor light

  And watch the sleeping city down the hay; The world about is faint and far away A thing of understanding more than sight, And with the dawn, like some enchanted rite, It rises from the mist to meet the day.

  The shades of night have set their sombre sail And fled before the crimson scythe of dawn; The stars go out, like candles in a gale

  And leave a scene some artist might have drawn, Of ships aflame and spires in golden mail That hesitates a moment and is gone.

  *

  WORDS FROM A WANDERER

  I do not know your wooded slopes and streams But as the passing stranger knows the way The nets of

  dusk have trapped the ending day,

  When webs of shadow snare the filtered gleams; I only know how dim the pathway seems And how the dust from many roads of gray, Has sunk into my heart and made me pay With tears and loneliness for these few dreams.

  I do not know the way the hearth-light hums Nor how the kiss of childish lips may feel,

  I only know the way the mad sea churns

  And how the blowing spray, like hits of steel, Can tear like savage teeth, and rip from me, These last reluctant hopes, and leave me free.

  *

  TO CLEONE: IN BUDAPEST

  You were so sure your warmth and love would hold And you did not think of the trade wind’s whine, Nor could you know the lands I’d known of old, Or that the paths you knew were never mine.

  You did not guess the curse of common things, Or that the bonds of love could ever chafe; You thought the eagle’s firmly pinioned wings Were bound so very close that love was safe;

  And then one night when stars were soft and clear, Like harbor lights in some strange port of calling

  dropped my off-shore lines and harbor gear, And sailed away to sea and left it all.

  *

  I’M A STRANGER HERE

  If I, between two suns, should go away, No voice would lift to ask another why, No word would question my retreat, nor sigh, Nor wonder why I’d chosen not to stay; For I’m a stranger here, of other clay;

  A guest within this house, a passerby A roving life whose theme has been “Goodbye”

  A shadow on the road, a thing astray.

  What dim ancestral heritage is mine That now awakens in my blood regret?

  What destiny is this, what strange design, That I must seek a haunting silhouette In unremembered lands my dreams divine,

  But cannot quite recall nor quite forget?

  *

  WITHOUT THIS LAND

  These tawny hills cannot be mine, for here Am I a stranger too, an alien thing Swept up by some uncertain tide, or blown By casual winds; these stubbled fields that lie So impotent beneath the autumn sun Gathering strength before the quickening urge Of spring will swell the soil with some

  New birth, and green will grow the cotton then, And corn-lands sun themselves to life anew Beneath familiar skies, but fields I know The moment only, then no more, for I Shall pass and sink no roots within this soil.

  The pasture here cannot be mine to feel Nor yet these dwarfish trees that twist above Whining their anguish to the winter wind. Not here am I to lean against a tree, Feeling the furrowed bark beneath my hand And knowing it and I were rooted deep In this same loam; not here am I to feel The soil is one with me, with this my flesh, This heart, this brain; not here am I at home Nor yet upon the sea where long slate swells And slowly heaves and rolls and flings itself Against the bulwarked rocks, to roll again And yet again with long repeated blows.

  Not here am I at home, for this quick flesh

  Is born of many seas and many roads Is one with dust and wind-blown spume, and leaves That fall and feed themselves to earth again.

  These things I know but as the passerby With many other things before, beyond This land, these hills, those ships and seas are all A part of me, my flesh is of that dust, That rain, that brine, that song is in my blood; The dust of many roads is now my flesh, And dust to dust returns, so this must strive Ever returning to the roads again, And I am rooted neither there nor here But am a stranger to this soil, this hearth.

  *

  LIFE

  I dream, and my dreams are all broken; I love and my loving is vain …

  I speak, and the words are all spoken, I look and see nothing but pain.

  *

  BIOGRAPHY IN STONE

  It still was dark when he paused at the desert’s edge Above, the ridges lay like a sleeping beast

  Against a sky where late stars hung like lamps Suspended from a canopy of shade.

  Standing alone, he watched the morning begin, A bigger man than most, and marked by life

  With lines of pain, with moulded power and strength. In the east the pale bacillus of the sun

  Faded the darkness with a misted glow The shadows, too reluctantly at bay, Yielded before the slow advance of dawn, And a crimson arrow hurled a flame across The clouds to sear the sable from the sky Except where dying darkness dripped a blood Of shadows in the lee of shattered cliffs.

  Already a massive head was taking form, Growing from the granite into brows and nose A sombre etching against the dawning light; Hands upon hips he stared upward, watching The morning paint a blush upon the cliff,

  A thousand feet of sheer, unbroken rock Thrusting itself up boldly from the sand.

  From twenty miles away it could be seen, The highest point in all that rocky range; Crossing the valley’s floor it gripped the eye,

  A monument in stone where years had left

  No blemish more than did the shadows of cloud Floating so lazily across the sun.

  Slowly his sculptor’s eye took in the line Of that gigantic head, feeling its way Across those heavy brows and where the eyes Were soon to be. It was too great a task Too much for any man in one short life.

  Out of that stolid stone his mind had thought To create something grand that would remain, A silent symbol of the strength of men,

  To last through many years-a guardian

  Of the sands whose tranquil brow was evidence

  That here Man dreamed, and dreaming dealt with stone, Carving the greatness and the majesty of Man

  Into this timeless form to leave behind A mute protest against futility.

  Turning away, he took the mountain trail Winding upward across the precipice, A narrow path that was a slender thread Suspended there between achievement and death; A rolling rock b
eneath his careless

  foot

  Might be the fitting end to such a dream,

  And check with one swift plunge his carving hands. Thinking of it, he smiled, and looked back down

  The dizzy height, quite unafraid of falling. At last he reached the top and stood alone. Darkly, against the amber light of dawn He watched the evanescent sun rays climb, Then turned to sort his gear before the day Of work began, yet pausing time to time To deeply breath and watch an eagle soar Above the cliff; sometimes it dropped so low

  It seemed to sweep his head with slanting wing. “Look out, old bird, you’re coming close!” he said, “But we’ve a lot in common-did you guess?” Below, a rattling car disgorged three men,

  Who saw his figure etched against the sky.

  “He’s a man, that one!” the older man remarked. “It’s all a dream, but what a splendid dream! Ours would be a better world if more

  Could dream like that. But it’s too big for us.” “He’s a fool, Casey. Why spend his gold like that? I’d never do the like as long as beer And women last. He worked too hard, then sold His claim, and puts the money into this.

  But what a job! I like it, too, but I

  Don’t have to pay the bills. Let’s go aloft.” Silently mounting across a golden cliff, And joining Morgan above the lofty brow They lowered staging down the precipice Descending to their work.

  Day after day

  Their muscles shaped the cliff, the stone took form As though a Titan stepped from living rock;

  The shoulders, hands and feet half-shaped by wind And rain and sun before the work began.

  “See, Casey,” Morgan said. “It’s not so hard. I used to wonder no one saw the lines Before I came along-it all was here.

  A rounding here and there, a needed touch, And just like that the figure takes its form. The face alone remains, and that’s the job.” “Ay, a job is right. How long did this

  This man of yours stand waiting for an eye? How many million years will men go by And wonder at the hand that carved this stone?” “They’ll wonder then, for all of me. My name

  Is only a symbol for a certain thing,

  A certain face and hands, and certain thoughts; The face and hands will go-this job will last The bundled dreams and lies, the doubt and hope, The things that make up Me, they will be gone; My flesh and blood will turn to grass perhaps, To feed the cows that feed the young of fools. So why the name? I like the job itself, It’s something for a man with guts to do,