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Je suis toujours malade
et sans courage
I am still sick,
without courage

A meetin’ with despair
The clock, sand and water
Epitaph: Je reste avec vous
I am strugglin’ to stay with you

Get this dream unstuck now
Free from the prattle
of reality
Forget about
the tickin’ clock
The explosive words fall,
vengefully eternal,
wave upon wave,
through the variations,
through sands of time

Except for you
nothin’ matters

Sweet-scented destruction
Eloquence of despair
Empty sail, drift off course
Words nick, and there
and there
and there
and there
sleeps a deep poetry

The maudlin painted night
Pained memories
Wave on wave of chills
Dreamin’ in a heap of dreary
hurried, sad rendevous
Adorned with a chronic malaise
Adrift in a cold midnight sun
Slowly founderin’, light fadin’

And so sinks the evenin’
thus, into mirrors of sadness
And now it is so
Thin phenomena alone
in front of the memory pained
night, left but with the lack thereof

An obstinate miner
of the exploited void
The potential,
of all that could have been,
in the rough, glitters there
minglin’ with the regrets

Princess of the dark sleep
listen to my protracted plea,
deliver me from the mountain
where upon this spell, this way came

By the pen one with the other
wedded on the pages
Sobs of anguish
Betray you fair stanzas
to run and awaken elsewhere
Plot no admonition
Simply deaf like you and bereft
Blind like you, endless time
Elaborate in the prairies
of the inner silence

Born yet unborn
The words of the dark birth
and the poem of the words
and the stanza
of the poem and
the group of the stanza
and the words of the group
and the letters
of the words and
the last loop of letters

Now without you
between as is and never was
Time gives a shake
and I walk to the other side
unforgiven
without lucidity

© Copyright 2013 mac tag Cowboy Coleridge All rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Edward Hopper (Upper Nyack, New York; July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967 Manhattan); realist painter and printmaker.  While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.  Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

He re-encountered his future wife Josephine Nivison, an artist and former student of Robert Henri, during a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  They were opposites: she was short, open, gregarious, sociable, and liberal, while he was tall, secretive, shy, quiet, introspective, and conservative.  They married a year later.  She remarked famously, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”  She subordinated her career to his and shared his reclusive life style.  The rest of their lives revolved around their spare walk-up apartment in the city and their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod.  She managed his career and his interviews, was his primary model, and was his life companion.

Hopper’s The House by the Railroad inspired the look of the Bates house in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. The painting is a fanciful portrait of the Second Empire Victorian home at 18 Conger Avenue in Haverstraw, New York.

Gallery

Self-Portrait, 1906

 

New York Interior, c. 1921 whitney museum

Night on the El Train (1918) by Edward Hopper

 

Nighthawks (1942)

Office in a Small City

The House by the Railroad

 

Stephen Vincent Benét
Yale College B.A., 1919

Today is the birthday of Stephen Vincent Benét (Bethlehem, Pennsyvania; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943 New York City); author, poet, short story writer, and novelist.  Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937).

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

• “American Names” (1931)

The Lover in Hell

• Eternally the choking steam goes up
  From the black pools of seething oil…

• For ever… well… it droops the mouth. Till I
  Look up.
  There’s one blue patch no smoke dares touch.
  Sky, clear, ineffable, alive with light,
  Always the same…
  Before, I never knew
  Rest and green peace.

• She is all peace, all quiet,
  All passionate desires, the eloquent thunder
  Of new, glad suns, shouting aloud for joy,
  Over fresh worlds and clean, trampling the air
  Like stooping hawks, to the long wind of horns,
  Flung from the bastions of Eternity…
  And she is the low lake, drowsy and gentle,
  And good words spoken from the tongues of friends,
  And calmness in the evening, and deep thoughts,
  Falling like dreams from the stars’ solemn mouths.
  All these.

 

The Song of the Day is “Painted from Memory” written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello and performed by Costello.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owners.  No copyright infringement intended.

Mac Tag

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