The Book of the Makar1
after Keith Monroe Lyons
I.
The moon that shows the cornfield tussle with
The wind, the silver gravel underfoot,
The nighthawk climb, then pause, then earthward dive,2
Shows him, a hungry youth
Walking a hungry road, not knowing what . . .
Just that all doors along the way are shut,
And not one soul cares that he is alive.
The night air, a blue gauze spun by the moon,
Cooly arrayed below the frenzied sky,
Drapes delicately round the earth’s big shoulder,
A silent lullaby
Coaxing the boy to let himself lie down
At the roadside, whispering: “Where you’re bound
Will wait for you, rest, rest upon the clover.”
His proud resistance ebbs with every step
Until the dizzy stars’ and gravel’s glint
Kaleidoscope and spin before his eyes
In a confusing heap;
He’s caught by unseen arms when pride is spent,
They find him, with his body’s blind consent,
A bed the dazzling heaven canopies.
As he lies down he leaves the stars behind
And enters where the night shines on within him,
A living whirl of hopes, hatreds, desires and fears,
Time past and also time
To come; his mind debates the day’s decision,
His soul tells prophecies of strange precision,
His heart remembers tenderness, and loss, and tears.
II.
A lady sings to him through loving smiles,3
Cradles his head, gently brushing his cheek,
Leans down to kiss him, eyes filling with sorrow,
And is about to speak
When she dissolves – across millions of miles
The sun’s lance is rudely thrust, and defiles
The night, whose thousand wounds run red and narrow.
The light invades his mind, a yellow gas
Extinguishing his rest and reverie
At once, stealing his strength; his limbs feel pinned
Numb, helpless on the grass;
He is unable to stand, nor can he
Fall back to sleep; he strains to move, to see,
To feel something besides panic and pain.
One antidote fights poisoned times like these,
And that is time itself, and so it’s proved
Again, as the minutes, like some hundred
Hours, hours like centuries
Drag on their torturous way, the pain’s removed,
The light becomes warm; So his mind is soothed,
Weakness, panic, dissolve to dreams, and fade.
Before he can reclaim his dream, a gust
Brushes his face, warm as a human breath.
It seems to caress his face lovingly.
He feels the need . . . he must . . .
Open his eyes . . . to see . . . what?. . .things the South
Wind has prepared for him?…he licks his mouth,
Fully intending, to . . . to what? . . . it passes.
Sleep has held its own, but the gust recedes
Far from exhausted; for just a half-blink:
It pauses, then pushes again, finding
A voice: the lisping reeds
Of a cottonwood windbreak swell and sink
Sibilant suspiration; their leaves wink
And flash mysterious signals of the Spring.
The boy sighs too, and irresistibly
The sigh engenders an ambitious yawn;
It conquers by slow insinuation
Throat, mouth, and lungs, quickly
Radiates in rampaging blood to bone
And sinew, spreading with the spreading dawn
Til light and consciousness in and around him reign.
III.
So grudgingly his eyes yield to the gust,
Anticipating yet another wrong,
Another pain, more hunger, and the rest
Of those jokes day will thrust
Upon the vagabond. But no – a throng
Of Mayday wonders greets him, and a song
Of joy fills him as May air fills his chest.
He blends into the conscious chemistry
That sunlight has concocted in the day;
And all his hunger, loneliness and pain,
As if by alchemy
Are momentarily dissolved away,
Suspended in a spinning roundelay
Which all the sorrows of the world could not restrain.
Windsong, birdsong, colorsong, majestic
Glowing high billow moving in deep-
toned white round sweep across wide blue song
Blaze; below wee dung tick
Silly tumbles in cowpie: by his whipped glee
The boy sings; he fingers the grass to see,
Sings, above his morning love rose, a song.84
Sunlight
Woke me
With the wild rose
With the wild rose
Made me
Happy
With the wild, wild rose
Waking
Blinking
Smelled the wild rose
Smelled the wild rose
Smelled like
A lady
Pretty as the wild, wild rose
Quick jumps
The beetle
Tumbling in the dust
Tumbling in the dust
Seems to be
Laughing with me
We laugh in the tumbled dust
Stand up
Singing
Singing this fine song
Singing this fine song
Time to
Be traveling
Singing this fine, fine song
It doesn’t matter how far
How far? who knows?
And who knows how long
I travel with this fine song
Sun-guide and guide-star
And I travel with the wild, wild rose
Treetops, birds, farm dogs, lonely trains
Accompany him as his song goes on;
The sun’s eye keeps watch, staid, solemn fence posts
Stand sentry on the lanes
He skips so carelessly; the crowded lawn
Stands awe-struck at the roadside; from the dawn
No stops til stars steal through the fading blue like ghosts.
IV.
His song which long ago was surrendered
To time and the infinite imagination,
Which lives in him as a dimly remembered dream,
Was not here re-tendered
In the usual hope of the usual re-creation,
To equal what was; this song is an exception:
A slight reflected image of Love’s brightest beam.
Next Section: Epilogue to the Book of the Makar
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1 This section recounts a story Pop told me over and over (to my delight) when I was growing up. It was one of many times he attempted to escape the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans Home, where he went to live after his mother, Bessie, died in 1912, when he was eight years old. Pop tried to escape a number of times, and each story was more hair-raising than its predecessor, but this time, perhaps the first, was marked by the miraculous events described in this work.
2 I remember sitting with Dad on a summer evening and watching the nighthawks dive.
3 Bessie Grady Lyons, his mother, who died when he was eight years old.
4 Pop told me the poem that follows was like the song he sang that day he ran away from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans Home, probably around 1915, when he was nine or ten years old.