The Poems of Maxim Morel I

With the recent success of The Hinternet’s first feature from an English-language poet, Maria Theresa, our founding editor reached out to me again to see if I might be able to furnish forth any others. Again, the commandment came: “Find me a poet, and let it be a special one.”

Well of course I was hoping all along that JSR would come back with a request for more, so I’d already reached out to my friend Maxim Morel II, whose book, The Poems of Maxim Morel I, remains one of the most interesting conceptual projects I’ve encountered from a contemporary author.

In 2010, after the passing of his father, the younger Morel’s mother discovered a collection of the father’s youthful poems, dated 1958 — when Morel père was only eighteen. Ever since this discovery, Morel fils has been working to transcribe, edit, and publish his father’s poems. Soon after he began, however, he found himself disturbed: the poems were strange, and they suggested strange things, including the possibility that the man had given himself that peculiar name after reading Adolfo Bioy Casares’s classic novel The Invention of Morel (1940). Indeed, my friend suspects his father may have taken the title of that sci-fi masterpiece in an even stranger, quasi-autofictional direction, by dedicating his poems to a young lover he called “Faustine”, just as in the book.

Eventually my friend felt his project needed to change directions, with the result that, at this point, The Poems of Maxim Morel I is much more than an ordinary single-author collection of poetry. Maxim the younger has inserted many of his own poems in response to those of his father, and connected them both with quotations from Casares’s novel, as well as with his own glosses on the shifting nature of his father’s vaguely modernist, vaguely romantic poems.

It’s been painful for me to see just how much difficulty Maxim has faced in getting any of this important work properly published. Part of the reason I’ve taken to bugging JSR so much about these poetry posts is my concern to feature people like Maxim, who really fit nowhere in the established field of published poets. Fortunately, JSR agrees with me that The Hinternet is the ideal home for such unplaceable talents as his.

So here, along with excerpts from the introduction to the book, Maxim has allowed us, for the first time, to publish a pair of his father’s remarkable lyrics, from The Poems of Maxim Morel I.

—Sam Jennings,
Poetry Editor at The Hinternet
(Read more from Sam at Vita Contemplativa)

“But even though Morel may be in love with Faustine, why should it be assured that Faustine returns his love?” — Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

When my father died, my mother dug through the papers he’d kept, all his life, secreted away in a small trunk, to which only he had the key — a key he kept on his person at all times, even while bathing. What she discovered there, along with various old letters, was a pile of disorganized poems: unbound sheaths, tied with an old tattered string, on which he’d copied out one-hundred twenty-one lyrics, apparently written in his youth. On the first of the sheets was a note, addressed to her. It read:

My dearest Julie,

Forgive me, ma petite. There have been so many things in my life that I shared with you: with you I shared anything, everything, a man could ever share with his beloved. And please always consider yourself my beloved, as I have always considered you so, no matter what you may read in these lines, animated as they are by the earnest and overblown sentiments of a very green and turbulent youth. For this is the one thing I never could share, nor ever knew how to share. Long before we met —before I made you my beloved— I loved someone, and she was the heart of my heart, the earth of my earth, skin of my skin. She died when we were both eighteen. And I have still never known grief to compare to it.

There are many kinds of love, ma petite. I believe that. With you my love was sturdy, rock-like: we shared the love of true life-partners. I could face the world with you, like I never faced it with anyone. It was a love imbued with the love of our children, imbued with the warm soft embers of the living room fireplace, in the hearth of the beautiful home we built from our mutual lives. Your love for me was as a house which I could live in, a grave which I might lie in, and never fear death, and never be alone. When I die it will be this love I miss most. I know I will die with your name on my lips. Julie. Julie. My beloved. My home.

But still there is a special hurt (a beautiful, never-closing wound) in the heart of a youth awakened and broken by the love of a death-doomed girl. I know that when I die you will find these poems, and you will read them, and you will show them to our sons. But do not grieve the part of me you did not know. I could never bear truly to free myself of these lyrics, since to do so would be to be free of her — whom I cannot name, and will not; who resides in these poems, as she always resided in my heart, as my Faustine. I could not bear to burn or toss away these flowers of my youth, no matter how painful the memories still are. You must understand, ma petite, it would have meant losing myself, giving up the wound which had made me myself, which made me the man you fell in love with. The man whose children you bore. The man who loved you, as he loved his own life.

I could not bear to lose these effects, so I locked them away, where they would never threaten to impinge on the life I created with you. Until the day I sat down to write this letter, I had not looked on the contents of this chest. It has been fifty years. Fifty years in which I never set eyes on one letter; fifty years in which I never returned to any poem, or lingered over the verses I’d written for her. By this I proved to myself my love for you, my dedication to our life together. But now I know I’m soon to die, and I could not, without looking at them all, one last time. Remembering the man I once was, remembering the beauty and the melancholy of that youth. Remembering my Faustine.

Do not, in your anger or your sadness, wish to destroy my flowers. Let little Maxim have them. Let him decide what to do with them. Perhaps in reading them, he will come to know me better, to know that I have always tried hard to be a good father to him; know the part of myself I could not allow to come between myself and him. Perhaps he will forgive my failures as a parent, or at least he will read my lines and see that once I was a young man, no different than he. That once I had my own dreams and loves; that I am not only this sad old man whom he has fought and struggled with, all these long years.

Twilight settles on my eyelids. Distant waves ebb and splash lightly on the shore, from which my boat is soon to cast off. The end of things draws near. But once I had a little island all my own. Once I had an ocean to myself. And from the ringlets and oracles of foam that twirled and played in that great salt sea, the sad wrecked mariner of my soul was visited — visited by a Venus, an Undine, an Oceanid, born of the waves, sent to my heart, to save me there. And when she had completed my redemption, she climbed back into the sea, and took that part of the heart in which all the yearnings of youthful mariners are stored. These poor verses are all that remains.

With love forever, Your husband, Maxim Morel

I should start by clarifying that the rumors are not true: I did not, as some of my less trustworthy friends have suggested, in fact stumble onto the scene of my mother burning the poems and letters one by one. In her grief at my father’s passing, in the state of confusion brought on by this posthumous discovery, I know my mother was merely negligent. I know she didn’t intend to set the contents of the trunk so close to the open living-room fire (I’m sure his mention of our familial hearth in his note, though largely metaphorical, had simply inspired her to wander down there, to peruse the trunk’s contents in the glow of its homely light). I’m certain that the flame which consequently devoured some seventy-two of the poems, and all but one half of one of his letters, simply went unnoticed by my mother at first, given —as I have already mentioned—her considerable grief, confusion, and misery.

When, alarmed by the smell of smoke from downstairs, I found her in the act of rescuing the remaining papers from the small blaze, I could see, in the horror that played on her face, that she was only concerned with following my father’s instructions, and that her screams were due not to any agony over old love poems, but to the sad fact that his last wish might be made impossible by her mistake.

My father’s poetry has abolished the name; my own poetry is a way of forgetting.

—Maxim Morel II

“I repeat: there is no conclusive proof that Faustine feels any love for Morel.”

Apology for Survivors

From Rabaul the monsoon winds
And the ash like fallen stars had come— 
Scattering grays i’th’archipelagic sea, 
Ash-islands of the distant heart of me,
Like the triumph of a century—
And funerary trumpets called:
“Faustine,” “Faustine,” and again, “Faustine.” 
Called the death of my Faustine.

Intact on the continent he stood,
The mariner, each his eyes white flames, 
Burning asphodels in his brain,
With the memory of Faustine. 
Impossibly young, the mariner,
Too young to be as ancient as
The wind he felt on his southern brow 
In Toulon, Marseille, or Cannes.

Enough mourning for the pyroclast!
It broke his brow with its ancient blast, 
In the curtain of her bedrobe formed 
The Uranic night-sky folding;
In the Saturnalian age, the last man 
Offered Cybelennic totems
To his Faustine, and the water-nymph 
Scattered his genitalia to the sea.

Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer...
But the Titan cannot last:
The quiet movement of the centipedes 
Beneath the rubble of waking dreams 
Find the sailor perusing his memories 
Again, in the quiet grocer’s aisle,
In Saint-Tropez, where first he heard
The call of a restless mockingbird.

Faustine: her Japanese-paper face, 
The curtain of her black hair, angled 
Like a communion chalice upturned, 
Spilling beauty everywhere;
He saw her dance across a screen, 
Flickering shadow—still flickering, 
Then dissipating in the night,
Like the ruins of Pagan lifetimes.

In the year of 1958,
The sailor saw Faustine—
A nymph of eighteen years, like him, 
The end of the mourning of a life. 
His love was simple, strong, and pure; 
Faustine was honest and demure.
But what is innocence? A fleck
Of spittle on the face of God.

They loved natura naturans:
The flower he grew through her took on 
The shape of a grafted stock unknown 
To god or man or woman.
In the garden of that true concord, 
Between some Heaven and some Hell, 
Faustine produced the asphodel:
It was the invention of Morel!

But the chant d’automne—it always comes, 
Leaves dry and die, and then the vine
Of lovers must un-intertwine,
In the bowels of the abstract sea.
The mariner and his Faustine
Felt the shadow in the room,
It dawned upon them as they slept,
It gloomed the promises they kept.

The motion of the sea! In spring
Must justify God in everything;
But in the cold, the old world blooms,
As the inverse of the flower—
From the womb of the very nymph of the world 
The sailor sees his young love hurled
And cast back as his manhood sinks
In the mythic, protean sea.

Faustina; how I lost you in
The water-wheel, in the dervish night, 
In 1958 the world stopped fast,
Then ended. And now all the rest
Is the ash in the rim of the caldera, 
Where the world would vent its hurt: 
The ocean swallows all but one,
And he must linger in the garden.

So from Rabaul the monsoon winds
And the ash of apocalypse still come— 
Scattering flowers i’th’archipelagic sea, 
Nymph-islands of the distant heart of me, 
Like the triumph of a century—
And funerary trumpets call:
“Faustine,” “Faustine,” and again, “Faustine.” 
Call the death of my Faustine.

The Swan

I have seen the swan; I have touched the hem 
Of a garment sown by ancient men;
I have slept atop a pillar,
All for love—for love—for love.

The genius of the swan has made it bright, 
It stands out blank against the night;
It is like the moon, pale and true,
It dances—dances—dances.

Some Salome was yielded to the moon, 
And the swan was forced to flee too soon— 
Mistaken for the dancer, yet
Not for a woman—woman—woman.

But the moon is Janus-faced, its lessons 
Fall on the swan in evening sessions,
I have seen its education
In the art—the art—the art.

And the swan is like the fault of our birth, 
Chosen hour by hour, across the earth, 
The wail and mewl of babes newborn 
From the mother—mother—mother.

But the swan must soon return to its pond, 
Where all the afternoon we yawn
And watch its stately progress there,
On the water—water—water.

Such a holy bird; such a lovely wing, 
Which flaps and stirs up everything, 
Which could be the wind itself:
I have seen it—seen it—seen it.

Yes I have seen the swan; and felt the sand 
Beside the pond in the swan’s marshland,
In its little kingdom, I have lived
All for love—for love—for love.