Ken Morrill

A dark drum - where is your heart
In the cellar of torture, on the rack of defeat.
Let the day come swiftly or this monumental climate
Shall sweep you away past the last path weeping
In a strong gust bleating which tale once told
Is a song thrice bold asking our mixed power
For resurgence of late. Lost in lingering fancy
By the languorous stream of a new-found country
In the best-felt dream. Lost but not quite hungry
Though unquiet still waiting unrelinquished
From the sorry hill. Of haste and of past time
Of mirth born of late going unannounced
On your unculled will.

My poems are not crystallizations in development, like Sam Putnam’s. They are rather parallel surges of the same mind seeking truth in verbal pleasure.

A Dream

Light coming from something, a second sun rising. The earth is strange, but nobody believes. Only a few are gathered, in religious complicity. Only the brightest, to think what to do.

Nostradamus is there, tending the fire.

A Dream

The road is patrolled by severe police. We must drive in one lane and only that.

Another

New York’s buildings are half-crumbled in. Great machinery is remaking he streets.

Another

Feelingly remembering Helena’s actual body and lovemaking with her for the first time since I was with her.

(I think psychologically this was a good release).

shiver and tremble
night flock and slip of moon
demanding dissolutions

The fountains of Rome
The arches and pediments
of a destiny unchallenged

What fate reveals on ocean’s sparkling revels
At feast in summer
remaking reshaping
All you said you were out of despair
Which means a new dream
not so easily diminished
As you once were

Thought and speech satisfying
Entrance into habitations

Of love suggested by those gistening golden hairs
On her slender arm

Vine-stanchioned and being a poet
But how can she love me?

Not by saying, though sweetly slaying

Appreciating when spirits are high is fruitful

Fitful with all of the things that exist in this world.

The Aleph contracting time and leaving space and all that’s in it.

“Musicians are terribly passionate,” he said (so long ago)
I believing him wondered if I was so entitled.
Later I heard “Musicians are temperamental.”
And I fused the two, faithful, needing no proof.

And still what I was, as maybe sensitive, was obscure to me.

Later I showed myself to be dark and passionate and tempestuous and temperamental at times.

When I think about it I always was, me,
That which distinguishes dream and disaster
Fate and the thin muffled ruffle of the sun-splayed shore.
Monstrous, almighty, unforgiving, unrelenting
Was the dance which signified death and forgetting.
Forgetting being the shadow of death, the hand of the disaster of nada descending.
Fragrance, the texture of alabaster soothing,
Making battered man remember the espionage of the sea,
In a cup of petaled roses but more
Including the human dimension
The real and actual particulars of romance.

One shouldn’t need to always be doing something. I have lived a lot, in all capacities.

“And as I need to be loved, if noone will love me, I love myself” - some would say that of my high solitude.

To think that I require continual sustained attention from others is silly. No artist can live with that. No man like me can.

There is a time to be with a girl, a time to be strong in solitude, even when something of that sort is possble, though not only the best at the time. There are those who will reach for any opportunity, and I have taken more, to a purpose, and in a mood, but I am not of that mind these days, though I almost am. It all seems to wait on me, and is never there when I am waiting. For my fortune loves disdain, the god of the highest solitude.

I feel like a real rugged writer. But also capable of crying. Last night’s dreams were intense and I woke in the middle of the night, sleepless and intense. So strong I wasn’t afraid. It’s only the whole universe surrounding me, why should I be?

All fears too, past and present, all forms, all things. I faced them in the night - brave, strong, because the correlative for the universe was trembling in my fiery night, awake, breast.

Churning through the deepest storms in my notebook chasing away the leagues of dark angels leaving about the city of ice, opening the mirror, standing in a glimmer all fails following he gray light which flickers. Or that moon saying yes I should have gone faster down the streets of steel.

Who I am I knew at my desk. People know me and they may seek me here. I am full of the high disdain. With the wisdom of the ages at my memory, the night creamed with stars shivering, the regalia of a thousand dreams, all of the trees in the world, all of the sea shores, rising enigmatically from the sea floor. Butterfly wings I saw in December 1982 in Rome, Italy.

Journal

For a long time I will remember the waves at night in other countries, like I saw yesterday on Cape Hatteras. They were wine-dark and deep and like the sea off of Camburi, Sao Paulo, they seemed to go forever out to a boundless horizon.

My limitations made me dream of other places. But perhaps even what has been seen as my largest failure: Brazil, is an accomplishment I ought to be proud of. One thing literature has done for me, if it has done nothing else, is give me a sense of the world as vast and full of glittering meanings, or at least and maybe especially as good, of myself as good doing my best in a strangely unknown world.

That things might happen to me more often as they only sometimes do, with a force and persuasiveness which changes my whole life.

Journal

Quotes from my Thai girlfriend:

“You’re such a hyperbolic person.”

“That’s a milky kiss!”

Journal

It was only this of which he had dreamed: the gray trappings and the singular steps, and a matter-of-fact tone with some rather strange things.

Journal

I don’t know whether even to walk is what I want to do. I could go to church but —– I’ve been there before and the only value is to see pretty girls and who are the Catholics but I’m tired of that. It is an excellent day and there is sunshine in Kafka though a lot of murky light also and I have the big option of going in to the bookstore to work, something I sort of promised to Cathy, my darling friend at work. To read - to keep reading, would be the best thing to do, and maybe a walk later, possibly to work, this way seeing some dresses and getting some sunshine also. But truly I have to be selfish about what I do if I am to get my masters this semester and then be free to if I want to go someplace else, possibly to Europe again.

Journal

The grass has grown tall and gone to seed so the birds have come to feed in the afternoon and the sky is clear as it hasn’t been since I arrived in Charlottesville one week ago. The mountains of the East Coast are rounder than those of the West and the countryside is more lush and fecund with vegetation.

Today I read some Defoe prose about the Plague and about a spirit appearance and I read “In the Penal Colony” by Kafka–all reading toward my classes. And elbow noodles and a pepper sauce is simmering on the small electric burner of this clean and quiet basement apartment.

That my life be as interesting as the books I read.

All tasks ought to either be the task of a day or be broken up into day-segments–to achieve the effect of completion which marks a good night’s sleep.

To travel, and see strange places–to feel new emotions, to have fresh ideas every day.

Everything I know all together comes bearing on this moment–all I can imagine and think.

The importance of keeping high spirits
Failing not to remember
Glaring lights in the distance mentioned casually
Omission.

Where all the mystery of the earth lies–?
In words, sights, people’s faces.

My own entertainment, amusement–was also to realize much vivid, actual–important–not only just “passing the time” in a melancholy way, but also “doing something about it.”

The untidy opinions of myself which surface from murky dreams when first waking.

The best strength in handling the fragile, tender boy that I am today is carefulness.

To play with these things is magic.

Maybe I will find myself on a new plateau–after long effort–an invisible spurt of development.

I have remembered with my words many good things.

I want a way of understanding every scene or incident of human life–of plundering the murk-trodden sea of various experience.

I should always work very hard to do this which I want.

Make it, though daily, a continuous effort, this reading after sleeping after reading.

Hearing Hongtao talk about scientific precision and the working out and solution of a problem makes me want to work as diligently on my papers.

I can see the decline of America.

Journal

“One’s journal, here in one’s solitude, is of service at least in this, that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience. One puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it so.” –Walter Pater, “A Prince of Court Painters”

“The windy lakes in which their lords delight.”

I, who want to be in heaven most the time, don’t want to do the same damned thing over and over again. To have energy for my expression, vivid and alive to be, interested and good, laughing when I can, feeling expansion, like fresh air inhaled, wish to be fascinated and long to compose, florid sentences to charm mine ear, fragrant thoughts that waft in a spiritual breeze. I also long for sleep, and good dreams–not the impossible fantastic, but the realizable good tune like the Mozart I hear here in my room and the moist breeze from my fan–my soft bed waiting for me.

I saw a black musician befriend a white woman (whom he knew) and be turned down (she didn’t acknowledge him because she was with white people)–and then I heard him weeping–and I was really touched.

I believe I really do live each day of my life as an adventure–as though I were on the road–I feel this most by the way I eagerly prepare for sleep–the fact that I have full days gives me good nights of sleep–and I do have rich days despite the hours of despair and sorrow–the most interesting happening in the love of people–they I remember the best–their faces, their beauty is best to hold in my mind.

Back in Charlottesville in the same room which is clean and quiet mainly. A place to sleep and read and write. And read and write much must I these months until December–I hope and I want it to be a good semester, most importantly for me in terms of people.

Journal