Book Review: Saturday Night Sage

Doctor Tinieblas

Saturday Night Sage by Noah Lekas, Blind Owl, $15 paperback, 2019 

Reviewed by Travis Cravey

Noah Lekas’ collection begins and ends with travel. In between we are told some amazing stories about work, philosophy, and the Midwest. We will deliver art to the wealthy in New York and wait impatiently with others for the factory bell in Racine to free us.

The subtitle of the collection is “narrative poems of mysticism and menial labor,” and Lekas delivers powerful messages on both, sometimes simultaneously. A sage, after all, has wisdom to share.

The poem “Midwestern” offers a view that Lekas has of the way things were as he describes his working past and “the disintegration/of a hard blue American backbone.” The labor, from janitor to construction worker, is that backbone that Lekas references. The work itself: difficult, thankless, even boring, but, still, proudly American. Because an American performed it, gave it meaning and value.

This same narrator, though, admits later that he has lived to see the home, and people, and work of his youth “packaged, leveraged & sold/like the Garden of Eden.”

And what is the answer? What do we do with the wreckage of our memory, the places we believed in that disappeared long before we were old enough to fully be a part of them?

The American sage offers a mix of Hinduism and Buddhism in an attempt to bring the reader, and the worker, peace. “‘Karya Sharira,’/Everybody has the power to heal,” he tells us in “Sacred Songs and State Roads.” “Legato. Let it go./Legato. Let it go.”

So even the spirits seem unsure, somehow. In the short poem “Painters Whites,” they speak of “One more job….” The work seems limitless only in the struggle, the author pointedly reminds us in “Penance.”

We all believed we were chosen to get it right,

that another generation wouldn’t stumble,

in the path of everlasting light.

In the end, though, there is no solace, only acceptance. As with “Every Drunk,” “you don’t need to see anything/to know what’s really going on.”

Lekas ends the volume in two ways, a sort of choose our own adventure, allowing the reader to see, as in “Commuter Train,”

It’s all labor my friend.

& it all ends with you

Climbing back in a box truck

& hitting the road again.

that there are two roads to take.

The poem “Living Interstate Blues” effectively ends the collection and describes the poet’s desire to be moving again, with all the “sincere” words “forgotten,” and “buried” — this stoic resolve to accept that the world resists our attempts to change it. “There’s a fox on the highway,” he tells us, “who ain’t worried what the time is.” The reader is allowed the philosophic and agreeable end to the journey. We flow with time, with the world, with the spirits, through our labor, our places, our gods.

But then there is one more page, one short, thirteen-word poem, throwing cold water all over our resolve. The sage isn’t done with us. He was just biding his time, waiting till the morning when he could confess his, and our, sins, and steel himself to the knowledge of another workweek, looming, unstoppable, coming right at you.

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Travis Cravey is a mechanic, writer and editor who tweets @TravisCravey. In 2019, he was named trampset’s Sexiest Man Alive.