Ken Morrill

Red is the soil
Blue is the sky
The men are cutting the road deep through the jungle
& machines
the
the jungle sprawls
the

Lewiston is vanishing–the city, sky, people
becoming dim–gray & thin–evaporating–
The stars do not impress me
I have reached a dullmination
I sulk to the restaurant to serve briskly
the customers–I am dying to the
place, leaving it before I leave, retracting
& slithering away–I will be brisked
away in a car ride / Providence / Boston
will matter for a week then flown over
the sea–over the equator south to Rio
south to Brazil to the southern clime the
southern sky the eager eyes of the traveler
stepping into the tropical heat, facing a
new phase of his development

various
The dark vocality, churning sensitive duration–
soft vivid caressing nation, gleaming
smiles–fabulous looks,
honey-indolent language
soft untried passage
new lease on life new relief and
release on face
on legs on steamy cream coated thighs
Relevant visual experience
Shuddering climax and renewal
regenerative multiplicity

Water spilling over the cliff
the vivid religious change
the ectatic communion

I worked today–a slow day at the restaurant.
I feel light & free about the work–knowing
it will soon be over

I want to go where each word I write
breathes in the silver-pointed change
of night, where twilight is long and
lisping–and the people emit a
radiant effervescency–good strong warm hearts

Please go to Boston Museum of Art for a day or two
before leaving for Brazil–one day to see Dan–
Maybe the Metropolitan can be seen on the
day the visa is obtained? That would
be nice.

26 Jan 85 Sat–Move to Rhode Island
02 Feb 85 Sat–Graduate Record Exam
05 Feb 85 Tue–Leave Boston for Brazil
06 Feb 85 Wed–Arrive in Rio, morning

I just want to read and write, take walks,
make love,–things of that sort.

food bed pills paper pens
transportation

Journal

I will soon leave Lewiston–I hope forever–because except for a few people, two dozen nice walks and a hundred splendid skies this place is a wasteland littered with worn-out emotions, scrubby forms and a crumpled sense of community which has been easy to ignore–although the superiority of places with more variety, such as Boston, had been becoming more and more missed. I am eager to try myself in distant cities, to splurge with brighter skies in Brazil, to scribble poetry like naughty Keats, looking where no one dares, hearing what no one hears, producing fragrant forms to delight myself and those who will be influenced in future days. I want to encourage the wanderer in myself–to seek out the bits of original culture that have not yet been overwhelmed by the modern empires of greed, mass-production and mass-pollution of the human festival, rapid communication of boredom and discontent, propagation of Walt Disney images and stereotypes of South America. I seek intimate insight, the inside story of the imagination, the secret of my own development as an artist, child, lover, and dreamer in the tempest of the forest of my mind. I seek the reason for the poems that I admire; I honor the drama that reveals the consciousness of the characters that I meet; I want to let the sand of many beaches all around the world sift in fistfuls through my fingers, while I listen to the hymn of the waves as they thunder onto the shore. For I am one who would conquer time if he could and wander forever making friends on the way, enjoying good meals and sleeping in pleasure through the night. It is my fancy to laugh and frolic in the surf, to be silent at the campfire in the woods, to gaze with excited wonder at the paintings hung in the municipal gallery, to listen with joy to Mozart on the public radio station, to drink a cool beer on the lawn after tennis.

Journal

My resolution is to see more–geographically, in poetry, in people’s faces–a day in Boston after Christmas was a trove of suggestions for my excitable heart–for my sense of long continued emotions and rhythms from person to person–from father to daughter and friend to friend–states of being, ways of seeing–modes of thought I fancy myself perceiving–like Keats they press upon me, but gently, and flowing with the crowd in the subway–I sway, from breeze to breeze, the tree, the bee, who nimbly skirts from flower to flower. It is not enough to spend many days looking, one must also have poetry in one’s heart, music in the vision–for it is only by its beauty that we see a thing. The poet is not afraid to be alive to anything. Oscar Wilde wrote: “The supreme vice is shallowness. All that is realized is right.” “The fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees” wrote Blake, indeed the entire world and the universe of human experience is not the same to one alert to beauty as to another with stale habits of seeing. And the difference is not merely that between elation and depression, because the majority of human experiences seem to me sobering and perplexing–and the physical world baffling and subduing–and the great activity of sympathetic loving often brings one into the condition of the sufferer–the difference is rather one of depth of insight or inscape–the possession of which is signified by a richness in variety of expression–we can see how someone sees a tree by what they say about it–not by indication but by recreation, not by abstraction but by impression.

Journal, Travel