I Saw A Wilderness of Stars

“All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

Louis L’Amour

Library Lovers

by Austin MacRae

She devours Steel, and he L’Amour.
She leads him to the fiction, where they part
for different shelves. He’s eager to explore
the tough ol’ west, and she the tough ol’ heart.
They meet me at the desk with separate piles.
Unthinkingly, I mix the books together.
I sense his wave of nervousness. She smiles
and quickly sorts the titles out. ‘Nice weather
today,’ she says. He slides his pile away,
averts his eyes, and waits for her to pull
out bags. ‘Let’s eat at Lou’s,’ I hear her say.
She grabs his arm and leads him, tote bag full
of cowboy stories swinging at his heel,
his sidearm holstered by her whim of steel.

Louis L’Amour wrote fiction but his life was purely genuine.  Born in Jamestown North Dakota as Louis LaMoore in 1908, he moved with his father in 1923 after family finances suffered from a series of bank failures and hard times in the farming business in North Dakota.  They moved west and for the next 20 years, L’Amour lived the life that would infuse his stories as a writer.  Ranch hand, professional boxer, dock worker, itinerant laborer and merchant seaman, he traveled the west and the world before serving in WWII in the Army. 

L’Amour always had an interest in writing and had some success placing articles on boxing along with short stories about a sea captain during the 1930’s and 1940’s.  It was during this time he published poetry including a number of sonnets. It wasn’t until the early 1950’s that L’Amour’s big break as a writer occurred when a short story of his was published in Collier’s with a western theme.  John Wayne and the producer Robert Fellows read it and Fellows offered L’Amour $4,000 for the rights to the screen play.  L’Amour wisely kept the rights to the novel, rewrote the short story as a full length novel that mostly followed the plot of the movie, changed the title of the novel to Hondo, same as the movie, with a quote on the cover from John Wayne saying; “this is the finest Western I have ever read.”  L’Amour’s success was cemented from there.  L’Amour wrote pulp fiction in a style that was popular and was prolific in his output. Many of his books might not pass the sniff test for political correctness of today, but as a writer, he was unflagging in his focus on entertaining with the novels he created.   I have probably read 10 to 15 Louis L’Amour books over the years, although none in the last 35 years. Although none of them are on my book shelves today, I look back and enjoy them all the more, knowing he also was a writer of sonnets.  

An Ember In The Dark

by Louis L’Amour

Faintly, along the shadowed shores of night
I saw a wilderness of stars that flamed
And fluttered as they climbed or sank, and shamed
The crouching dark with shyly twinkling light;
I saw them there, odd fragments quaintly bright,
And wondered at their presence there unclaimed,
Then thought, perhaps, that they were dreams unnamed,
That faded slow, like hope’s arrested flight.

Or vanished suddenly, like futile fears-
And some were old and worn like precious things
That youth preserves against encroaching years-
Some disappeared like songs that no man sings,
But one remained- an ember in the dark-
I crouched alone, and blew upon the spark.