Dear Z,  Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Good question posed below.  What is your main reason for livin’?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

for this one,
just pulled a word
out of somethin’
Dante wrote
“I’m surprised it’s not
from something in les fleurs”
astonished might be closer
“Thought I would give you a break”
ha, thanks
this theme does make it
a layup to write about today,
not gonna count the ways
but rather the reasons
j’adore m’amour

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a banal canvas of destiny
one may traverse with ease
content to just let it go

no judgement here
the absurdities can be
difficult to swallow
so, what the hell

forced to deal with
mind numbin’ daily
dreck, my goddess
how does one soar

perhaps this escape
find the pitch
of incessant desire

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Pale Love, Pale Rider

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a single thing…
one can no more be without the other
than the day without its verse

so long
possessed
so familiar
discourses in my mind
beyond inspiration

designs
on the canvas
destiny
becomes

brimmin’ with dreams
we must down the trail again
that we may not be denied

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

on the first line
i write each night
before i sleep,
of the verse
of you and i
appear these words…
you have given me
all, i will ever need

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the day we celebrate the birth of Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker, Dante, born Durante degli Alighieri in Florence, Italy, in 1265.  No one knows for sure the exact date but it is generally believed to be in May.  What is known about the poet is that he met his great love and muse, Beatrice, when he was about nine years old; it was love at first sight.  Three years later, he was promised in marriage to another girl, but that did not stop him from writin’ about Beatrice in his poetry, where he referred to her as his main reason for livin’.  There is a topic that could fill the hours; the main reason for livin’.  Right now, my main reason for livin’ is puttin’ words together for you my muse.

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday

La Vita Nuova (1293)

• In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria… si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.
  • In that book which is
    My memory…
    On the first page
    That is the chapter when
    I first met you
    Appear the words…
    Here begins a new life.
  • Chapter I, opening lines
• e le braccia avea
  madonna involta in un drappo dormendo.
  Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo
  lei paventosa umilmente pascea:
  appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.
  • In his arms, my lady lay asleep, wrapped in a veil.
    He woke her then and trembling and obedient
    She ate that burning heart out of his hand;
    Weeping I saw him then depart from me.
  • Chapter I, First Sonnet
• Ella è quanto de ben pò far natura;
  per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova.
  • She is the sum of nature’s universe.
    To her perfection all of beauty tends.
  • Chapter XIV, lines 49–50
• Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa…
  e così esser l’un sanza l’altro osa
  com’alma razional sanza ragione.
  • Love and the gracious heart are a single thing…
    one can no more be without the other
    than the reasoning mind without its reason.
  • Chapter XVI
• Sì lungiamente m’ha tenuto Amore
  e costumato a la sua segnoria
  • Love hath so long possessed me for his own
    And made his lordship so familiar.
  • Chapter XXI

• Il Convivio (1304–1307)

  • Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona
    de la mia donna disiosamente…
    che lo ‘ntelletto sovr’esse disvia.
    • Love with delight discourses in my mind
      Upon my lady’s admirable gifts…
      Beyond the range of human intellect.
    • Trattato Terzo, line 1.
  • La moralitade è bellezza de la filosofia.
    • Morality is the beauty of Philosophy.
    • Trattato Terzo, Ch. 15.

On this day in 1495 – A monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whisky.  John Cor is the name of the monk referred to in the first known written reference to a batch of Scotch Whisky.

“To Brother John Cor, by order of the King, to make aqua vitae VIII bolls of malt.” — Exchequer Rolls 1494–95, Vol x, p. 487.

Brother John Cor was a Tironensian monk based at Lindores Abbey in Fife.  He was a servant at the court of James IV.  The Tironensians were well regarded for their skills as alchemists.  Lindores Abbey is known as the ‘Birthplace of Scotch Whisky’ and visiting there is a pilgrimage for some whisky-lovers.  I love a good glass of single malt Scotch, so by all means, raise a glass of cheer to Brother John.

Today is the birthday of Maarten van Heemskerck or Marten Jacobsz Heemskerk van Veen (Heemskerk, Netherlands; 1 June 1498 – 1 October 1574 Haarlem, Netherlands); portrait and religious painter, who spent most of his career in Haarlem. He was a pupil of Jan van Scorel, and adopted his teacher’s Italian-influenced style. He spent the years 1532–6 in Italy. He produced many designs for engravers, and is especially known for his depictions of the Wonders of the World.

Gallery

self-portrait with the Colosseum

Portrait of an unknown woman

Portrait of a Lady spinning

Portrait of a Lady spinning

On this day in 1857 – Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal is published.

The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal with author’s notes.

Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. It was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.

 The initial publication of the book was arranged in six thematically segregated sections:

• Spleen et Idéal (Spleen and Ideal)
• Tableaux parisiens (Parisian Scenes)
• Le Vin (Wine)
• Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)
• Révolte (Revolt)
• La Mort (Death)

Baudelaire dedicated the book to the poet Théophile Gautier, describing him as a parfait magicien des lettres françaises (“a perfect magician of French letters”).

Foreword

The foreword to the volume, identifying Satan with the pseudonymous alchemist Hermes Trismegistus and calling boredom the worst of miseries, sets the general tone of what is to follow:

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,
N’ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C’est que notre âme, hélas ! n’est pas assez hardie.

If rape, poison, dagger and fire,
Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It’s because our soul, alas, is not bold enough!

The preface concludes with the following malediction:

C’est l’Ennui!—l’œil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère !

It’s Boredom!—eye brimming with involuntary tears
He dreams of gallows while smoking his hookah.
You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
Hypocritical reader, my likeness, my brother!

 

John Masefield
John Masefield in 1916

Today is the birthday of John Masefield (John Edward Masefield; Ledbury, Herefordshire 1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967 Abingdon, Berkshire); poet, writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. Perhaps best remembered as the author of the classic children’s novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and poems, including “The Everlasting Mercy” and “Sea-Fever”.

In 1901, when Masefield was 23 he met his future wife, Constance de la Cherois Crommelin (6 February 1867 – 18 February 1960, Rockport, County Antrim, Northern Ireland; a sister to Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin), who was 35 and of Huguenot descent and they married 23 June 1903 St. Mary, Bryanston Square. Educated in classics and English Literature, and a mathematics teacher, Constance was a good match for him, despite the difference in their ages.

Verse

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

From “Sea-Fever”, in Salt-Water Ballads (1902)

Most roads lead men homewards, mine leads forth.

 

I leave you with one of the strongest proclamations of love I have ever heard…

I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will. – Sylvia Plath

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  How does your heart break?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

inspired by Wilde’s
“Roses and Rue”
“Sadly, no stranger
to heartbreak”
here is a view
on the matter
i have not taken
“Oh do tell”
for the poet,
heartbreak does not come
in loss, it comes in silence
loss is the lifeblood of poetry
silence, the death, for if the poet
no longer hears the music,
that is true heartbreak
“And what do you hear my love”
i hear oceans of symphonies
and i will write them for you

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

sometimes,
if not often,
i get caught up
in how the words
sound when wound
together and i lose
all sense of meanin’

or i find as i dance
around sayin’ what i want
without sayin’ it, i end up
in an abstract ’l’ embrassade’
from which i cannot escape

to you, for wadin’ through
all of it, the heartbreak,
the sensical and not,
for you bein’ you,
i am most thankful

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Pale Love, Pale Rider

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

write
what you think
what you believe
what you dream

it is the only way

long enough were you there,
now no more in your eyes
we must attune ourselves
to the moments that matter

too long have we waited
now i will to you and you to i

be bold that by us
swear, never again

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

could we get back
what was lost
could we learn again
after all this time
at what price

were it possible,
could the past
be brought back
were it worth the pain

i often recall
the places
the way you looked

memories rushin’ back…
dancin’ naked
in the high
hill country rain

sensual overload
smell of rain
feel of wet skin

and later that night
the way you looked
and the way we were

then another day
in the rain
a hand as it waved adieu
and eyes as they searched

a crime, selfish
so much wasted time

could we get back
what we had,
at what cost,
could the past
call back

or, after all,
does broken
become too much,
or just a crutch

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

first light
the exchange
of a knowin’ look
well written verse

this place called the High Plains
thoughts for which the right language
has not been found and moonlight of course

a long anticipated touch
the sun in your hair
the sound of your name
a mutual sigh

somewhere between the said and the unsaid

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

Another from the Dark Muse.  I have given up on fightin’ her and now welcome her into my life.  Each night as I go to sleep I ask her to come and give me words.  So far, she is respondin’, perhaps too good.  I have many draft poems inspired by her.  Just have to find the time to finish ’em.  Today’s Poem of the Day was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “Roses and Rue”.

After all this time, a poet first and last.  After all that has happened; a poet still.  This to cling to.  Live like a poet, love like a poet, fight like a warrior poet.  And when love leaves, this is a……

Poet’s Heartbreak

Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, 1887

Today is the birthday of Walter “Walt” Whitman (West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, New York; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892 Camden, New Jersey); poet, essayist, and journalist.  A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.  Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.  His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.  Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money.  The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic.  He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892.  When he died at age 72, his funeral became a public spectacle.  He described himself in Leaves of Grass; “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women apart from them, no more modest than immodest.”

Peter Doyle may be the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman’s life.  Doyle was a bus conductor whom Whitman met around 1866, and the two were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: “We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me.” In his notebooks, Whitman disguised Doyle’s initials using the code “16.4” (P.D. being the 16th and 4th letters of the alphabet).  Oscar Wilde met Whitman in the United States in 1882 and told the homosexual-rights activist George Cecil Ives that Whitman’s sexual orientation was beyond question—”I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips.”

Another possible lover was Bill Duckett. As a teenager, he lived on the same street in Camden and moved in with Whitman, living with him a number of years and serving him in various roles.

There is also some evidence that Whitman had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress, Ellen Grey, in the spring of 1862, but it is not known whether it was also sexual. He still had a photograph of her decades later, when he moved to Camden, and he called her “an old sweetheart of mine”. In a letter, dated August 21, 1890, he claimed, “I have had six children—two are dead”. This claim has never been corroborated. Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had “never had a love affair”. As Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote, “the discussion of Whitman’s sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence emerges.

Excerpts from Leaves of Grass

• Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
  Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
  You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. (46)

• Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
  Now I will you to be a bold swimmer…

• I am the teacher of athletes,
  He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
  He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. (47)

• I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
  I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
  My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

• It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
  Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d. (47)

• I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.
  If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore

• And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. (49)

• There is that in me — I do not know what it is — but I know it is in me.
  …
  I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word unsaid,
  It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
  Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
  To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. (50)

• Do I contradict myself?
  Very well then I contradict myself,
  (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (51)

• I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

• Weep not, child,
  Weep not, my darling,
  With these kisses let me remove your tears,
  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
  They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
  Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
  They are immortal…

 

Walter Sickert, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1911

And today is the birthday of Walter Richard Sickert (Munich 31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942 Bath, Somerset); painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London.  He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century.  Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects.  His oeuvre also included portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs.  He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.  Decades after his death, several researchers and theorists suspected Sickert to have been the London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, although the theory has largely been dismissed.

Gallery

‘Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour’ (1907)

The Camden Town Murder, 1908

Reclining Nude (Thin Adeline) MET

Portrait of Sickert in 1884 

The Acting Manager or Rehearsal: The End of the Act, (portrait of Helen Carte), c. 1885

La Giuseppina, the Ring (1903-1905)

 

Henry Tonks. Sodales: Mr Steer and Mr Sickert, 1930 

Brighton Pierrots (1915)

Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, c. 1907

The Song of the Day is “Poet’s Heart” by Westlife.  We do not own the rights to this song. All rights reserved by the rightful owner.

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Dear Z, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Hope you are well.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

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© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i write you
in my thoughts
to ask how did we let
so much time and distance
come between us

inevitable
that i return
and find you
to question,
are you as content
as i wanted you to be

and still i am stirred,
never havin’ admitted
to the need,
the tenderness found

drivin’ along a caliche road
through late evenin’s
cool breeze in our hair,
want, heavy as we stop
for the night

to get back to that

in the lane
we touched
we were there

do not let go

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

always begins and ends
with thoughts of you there
and how no place
was ever the same
without us

at times, overpowerin’
even now, the thoughts
cannot imagine bein’
without and yet forlorn
is no exaggeration

come
let us go there
now

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

My feet are firmly planted here in the West but my mind, dear Muse, is in Paris.  The French Open has begun, one of my favorite sportin’ events.  A beautiful sight, the red clay courts of Roland Garros.  And today marks the anniversary of the deaths of two legendary French figures.

Thinkin’ of Paris
always begins and ends
with thoughts of you there
and how you brought
even more light
to La Ville-Lumière
At times the combination
of your beauty and the city’s
was overpowerin’
Even now, they are thoughts
i cannot imagine bein’ without
and yet i am forlorn
that we are not there now
We will always
have Paris, mon chou
i go there often
with you in my dreams
Je t’aime Muse

© copyright 2016 Mac tag all rights reserved

On this day in 1431, peasant girl, national heroine of France, Catholic saint, The Maid of Orléans, Saint Joan of Arc was executed by burning in Rouen, France at the age of 19.

On this day in 1778, French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state, Voltaire died in Paris at the age of 83.

Of course these thoughts have a soundtrack and that would be Frank Sinatra‘s version of April in Paris.

Félix Arnaudin
Félix Arnaudin, C.1870 Picture by Adolphe Terpereau

Today is the birthday of Félix Arnaudin (Simon Arnaudin; Labouheyre, France 30 May 1844 – 6 December 1921 Labouheyre); poet and photographer, and a specialist in Haute-Lande folklore.  In Gascony, M. Arnaudin created his collection of tales by attending gatherings, as well as at marriages and at various agricultural festivals.  He left 3,000 photos at the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux.  Félix Arnaudin was the first to observe Haute-Lande as a native people.  He can be said to be at the same time linguist, folklorist, historian, ethnologist, photographer and writer.  He became noted studying the folklore of the Landes of Gascony, at that time in full economical and social transition. His work is centered on recording Gascon language fairy tales and songs; on land, habitations, shepherd and peasants photography. He thus consecrated his life to save this heritage from fading into oblivion.  His natal house became a photo exhibit managed by the Labouheyre commune.

Gallery

Femmes Landaises

 À la prochaine,

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Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Hey Z, hope all is well.  Jett says hey too.  He is well.  Busy at work.  Dry out here.  We could use some rain.  Mac Tag is right; those words are hard to say.  I do not know about you, but I do not say them.  But Jett can say them with ease and usually does to every pretty woman that smiles at him.  What say you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

so many words
so little time

focus on three here
ah but which three

vered over the range
of emotions, never
shy about that
coy perhaps
with the big three

had no idea what it meant
and the broken trail behind
proves that beyond doubt

well, now i should say
done with that

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time for bed my dear,
open the window,
the moon and stars,
a constellation
and the waves
hear ’em breakin’

our bodies wrapped
together, now
for our favorite part

oh but first this,
if It calls again
you tell It
not to insist,
i am not available

i have three words to say

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© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

say them, hear them

goin’ to sleep, safest keep
turn off the lamp on the headboard,

oh that is good, a little lower

do not leave alone: hear the verse,
it cradles and draws a few bars

for you to remember,
thank you
a constellation,
call again
insist, that we have come

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

yes, still
three words…
i and miss and you

silence, a home
might as well be
to the point
of freein’ myself

your eyes
and the shadow
wept for you,
and your arms,
and your body

alone: you hear,
it cradles
or you forget
it calls again
you try not to insist,
that you have come home

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today we start with the love song of the day.  Perhaps no truer words have ever been written than these:  Three words that are hard to say; I and Love and You.  The Avett Brothers I and Love and You.  Three words I longed to hear from you.  Three words that became hard to say.  Three words I hope to say, and hear, again.

Today is the birthday of Doris Ulmann (New York City; May 29, 1882 – August 28, 1934 New York City); photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934.

Ulmann’s early work includes a series of portraits of prominent intellectuals, artists and writers: William Butler Yeats, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Gish. From 1927, Ulmann was assisted on her rural travels by John Jacob Niles, a musician and folklorist who collected ballads while Ulmann photographed. In 1932 Ulmann began her most important series, assembling documentation of Appalachian folk arts and crafts for Allen Eaton’s landmark 1937 book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. In failing health, she collapsed in August 1934 while working near Asheville, North Carolina, and returned to New York. Ulmann died August 28, 1934.

Gallery

Ruth St. Denis, c. 1925

Student at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky

Cherokee woman, 1929

Alfonsina Storni
Alfonsina Storni

Today is the birthday of Alfonsina Storni (Sala Capriasca, Switzerland; May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938 Mar del Plata, Argentina); one of the most important Argentine and Latin-American poets of the modernist period.

Storni was among the first women to find success in the male-dominated arenas of literature and theater in Argentina, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American poetry. Storni was an influential person, not only to her readers but also to other writers. Though she was known mainly for her poetic works, she also wrote prose, journalistic essays, and drama. Storni often gave controversial opinions. She criticized a wide range of topics from politics to gender roles and discrimination against women. In Storni’s time, her work did not align itself with a particular movement or genre. It was not until the modernist and avant-garde movements began to fade that her work seemed to fit in. She was criticized for her atypical style, and she has been labeled most often as a postmodern writer.

She had a relationship with Horacio Quiroga (31 December 1878 – 19 February 1937) a Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer that ended in 1927 when Quiroga met Maria Elena Bravo and started his second marriage. It is not known if Quiroga and Storni were lovers, since the two did not address the nature of their love very much. What is known is that Storni saw Quiroga as a friend who understood her, and she dedicated a poem to him when he took his own life in 1937, only a year before she took hers.

On May 20, 1935, she underwent a radical mastectomy. In 1938 she found out that the breast cancer had reappeared. Around 1:00 AM on Tuesday, 25 October 1938, Storni left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two workers found her body washed up on the beach. Although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked into the sea until she drowned. She is buried in La Chacarita Cemetery. Her death inspired Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna to compose the song “Alfonsina y el Mar” (“Alfonsina and the Sea”). Argentine composer Julia Stilman-Lasansky used Storni’s text for her composition Cuadrados y Angulos.

Verse

Que por días enteros, vagabundo y huraño
no volvía a la casa, y como un ermitaño
se alimentaba de aves, dormía sobre el suelo
y sólo cuando el Zonda, grandes masas ardientes
de arena y de insectos levanta en los calientes
desiertos sanjuaninos, cantaba bajo el cielo

Dicen que silenciosas las mujeres han sido
De mi casa materna… Ah, bien pudieran ser
A veces, en mi madre apuntaron antojos
de liberarse, pero se le subió a los ojos
una honda amargura, y en la sombra lloró

Apagadle
la voz de madera,
cavernosa,
arrebujada
en las catacumbas nasales.
Libradlo de ella,
y de sus brazos dulces,
y de su cuerpo terroso.
Forzadle sólo,
antes de lanzarlo
al espacio,
el arco de las cejas
hasta hacerlos puentes
del Atlántico,
del Pacífico…
Por donde los ojos,
navíos extraviados,
circulen
sin puertos
ni orillas…

Dientes de flores, cofia de rocío,
manos de hierbas, tú, nodriza fina,
tenme puestas las sábanas terrosas
y el edredón de musgos escardados.

Voy a dormir, nodriza mía, acuéstame.
Ponme una lámpara a la cabecera,
una constelación, la que te guste,
todas son buenas; bájala un poquito.

Déjame sola: oyes romper los brotes,
te acuna un pie celeste desde arriba
y un pájaro te traza unos compases

para que olvides. Gracias… Ah, un encargo,
si él llama nuevamente por teléfono
le dices que no insista, que he salido…

Mac Tag

O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring.

W.B. Yeats

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Dear Z, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Hope you had a good day!  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reseerved

conscious, or not,
that my thoughts between,
tell me that we shall know
these stories, told
over many years
that now
we can embrace, knowin’
which goes first through the doorway, biddin’
goodnight, and which stays on a while alone

and all this through your eyes have stopped your fears

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the sudden dances
were always my favorites
how they mocked time,
and fate

i once knew how deeply,
fearfully and totally
beyond compromise,
beyond reservations
when the sighs
were not born
of ordinariness

and now to be in the present
havin’ lived through
years in darkness
and emerged
with my mind fairly sound
well, not sure much more
can i ask or hope

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

tried livin’ at the pitch
that is near madness
but there was too much
hangin’ on for dear life
almost to the end

thought it was what
i was supposed to do
thought i had to

and no one ever
intervened
to try to stop it,
to say; for the love
of god man, just stop

until now
hope it is not too late

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Thomas Moore

Today is the birthday of Thomas Moore (Dublin 28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852 Sloperton Cottage, Bromham, Wiltshire, England); poet, singer, songwriter, and entertainer.

Married to Elizabeth “Bessy”  Dyke, a Protestant actress, and hailed as “Anacreon Moore” after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore did not profess religious piety. Yet in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics.

Moore married Bessy in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London. Together with Bessy’s lack of a dowry, the Protestant ceremony may have been the reason why Moore kept the match for some time secret from his parents. Bessy shrank from fashionable society to such an extent that many of her husband’s friends never met her (some of them jokingly doubted her very existence). Those who did held her in high regard.

The couple first set up house in London, then in the country at Kegworth, Leicestershire, and in Lord Moira’s neighbourhood at Mayfield Cottage in [Staffordshire], and finally in Sloperton Cottage in Wiltshire near the country seat of another close friend, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne. Tom and Bessy had five children, none of whom survived them. Three girls died young, and both sons lost their lives as young men. One of them, Tom, died in some disgrace as a French Foreign Legionnaire in Algeria. Despite these heavy personal losses, the marriage is generally regarded to have been a happy one.

Today Moore is remembered almost alone either for his Irish Melodies (typically “The Minstrel Boy” and “The Last Rose of Summer”) or, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played with John Murray in the loss of the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron.

Verse

• And the best of all ways
  To lengthen our days
  Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!
  • The Young May Moon, st. 1.
• You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
  But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
  • Farewell! But Whenever You Welcome the Hour, st. 3.

• No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us
  All earth forgot, and all heaven around us.
  • Come O’er the Sea, st. 2.

• The light that lies
  In woman’s eyes,
  Has been my heart’s undoing.
  • The Time I’ve Lost in Wooing, st. 1.

• My only books
  Were woman’s looks,
  And folly’s all they’ve taught me.
  • The Time I’ve Lost in Wooing, st. 1.

 

Carl Larsson
Self-portrait (1895)

Today is the birthday of Carl Larsson (Stockholm 28 May 1853 – 22 January 1919 Falun); painter representative of the Arts and Crafts Movement.  His many paintings include oils, watercolors, and frescoes.  He considered his finest work to be Midvinterblot (Midwinter Sacrifice), a large painting now displayed inside the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts.

After spending two summers in Barbizon, the refuge of the plein-air painters, he settled down with his Swedish painter colleagues in 1882 in Grez-sur-Loing, at a Scandinavian artists’ colony outside Paris. It was there that he met the artist Karin Bergöö, who soon became his wife. This was to be a turning point in Larsson’s life. In Grez, Larsson painted some of his most important works, now in watercolour and very different from the oil painting technique he had previously employed.

Gallery 

 Self-Portrait in the new studio

Brita in the drawing room

• 

  Martina with the breakfast tray.

  

  Self portrait from 1906

• 

  Nameday at the storage house

• 

  The kitchen

 A studio idyll depicting the artist’s wife with her first child, Suzanne

• 

  Carl Larsson’s bed

• 

  “Cosy Corner.” From A Home (26 watercolours)

• 

  Summer morning (at Spardavet)

• 

  Flowers on the windowsill

• 

  Breakfast under the big birch, 1896 (“Frukost under stora björken“)

• 

  Christmas Eve (1904–1905)

• 

  Model writing postcards

• 

  Carl Larsson’s studio

• 

  Cray fishing with the family

 Painting in open air. The artist’s wife is sitting in the background

The Moviegoer (1961) 

• Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive. (2.9).

• I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. (2.12).

• She refers to a phenomenon of movie going which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. (1.7).

• I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

• A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

• The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

• She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.

• As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.

• Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it.

• A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.

• Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we’re sinning! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!).

• Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place…there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. (4.3).

• My aunt is convinced I have a “flair for research.” This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I’m not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can’t satisfy.

• For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

• To tell the absolute truth, I’ve always been slightly embarrassed by Walter’s company. Whenever I’m with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship of friendships, of cultivating an intimacy beyond words. The fact is that we have little to say to each other. There is only this thick sympathetic silence between us. We are comrades, true, but somewhat embarrassed comrades. It is probably my fault. For years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women.

• Beauty is a whore.

• Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies – my only talent – smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall – on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

• The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

• To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

The Last Gentleman (1966)

• What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.

• He was a young man of pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways. Save for his deafness in one ear, his physical health was perfect. Handsome as he was, he was given to long silences. So girls didn’t know what to make of him. But men liked him. After a while they saw that he was easy and meant no harm. He was the sort whom classmates remember fondly; they liked to grab him around the neck with an elbow and cuff him around. Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

• Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where there had been misery in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery.

• Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people.

• It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments.

• He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

The Message in the Bottle (1975)

• Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn’t work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness?
  There is only one place to start: the place where man’s singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.
  That singularity is language…

• Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
  Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?

The Second Coming (1980)

• You can get all A’s and still flunk life.

• The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s live were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn’t decide.

• Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

• You don’t ever really learn anything you didn’t know when you were thirteen.

• What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at teach other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the hall like ghosts.

• He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn’t. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn’t, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.

• In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

• Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?

• Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

• There is no fashion so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer.
  • Chapter 2, section 2: The Self as Nought (II).

Today is the birthday of novelist Maeve Binchy, born in Dalkey, Ireland (1940).  Binchy said: “We’re nothing if we’re not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways.”

You were that somebody for me Muse.  Does one ever get fortunate enough to find that somebody twice?

Still strivin’,

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

Mac Tag

And in a wild and sudden dance
We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance.
– WB Yeats

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. – Oscar Wilde

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. – Rachel Carson

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. – Sylvia Plath

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. ~ Vita Sackville-West

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be spoiled out of fear for future or regret for a badly managed past. – Sylvia Plath

I know now how deeply, fearfully and totally I love you, beyond compromise, beyond mental reservations I’ve had about you, even to this day. – Sylvia Plath

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew…
– WB Yeats

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge

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Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Check us out on Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  I hope Mac Tag keeps up the love song of the day.  I like it.  I also like New Orleans.  I have spent some time there with some beautiful women.  Somethin’ about those Southern Belles.  And I love the Walt Whitman quote below.  Rhett

The Lover’s Chronicle

Dear Muse,

yes, heard my name called
s’pose this is how this started

though it had to wait
many years
for a response

i ignored it, denied it
stuffed it in the closet
threw it over the fence
buried it in the backyard
locked it in the basement
even tossed it in the ocean

but it always
found a way back

then one day
when i finally
found solitude
i sat down to respond
and i am still respondin’

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

i now think it had to be this way,
for else it could not be
that this,
would have ever happened

whom i adore,
should come
and cast behind

in verse of as subtle,
as hath the first
that sits in shadows

rest, no more dreams
tonight, i will see to it

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

an understandin’
an intimacy
grown together,
no longer needin’
more than a glance
to communicate
feelin’s to each other

this draws me back
whenever whatever
tries to remove me

the only way i can feel
somewhere close to profound,
when i return to this, to you

more and more, only seem
to belong here with you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Wild Bill” Hickok
Signature

Today is the birthday of “Wild Bill” Hickok (born James Butler Hickok, Troy Grove, Illinois May 27, 1837 – August 2, 1876 Deadwood, South Dakota); folk character of the American Old West known for his skills as a scout, lawman, marksman, actor, gunfighter and gambler.  Some contemporary reports of his exploits are known to be fiction, but along with his own stories are the basis for much of his fame and reputation.  He went west at age 18 as a fugitive from justice, first working as a stagecoach driver, then as a lawman in the frontier territories of Kansas and Nebraska.  He fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War.  Hickok was involved in several notable shootouts.  He was shot from behind and killed while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory (now South Dakota) by an unsuccessful gambler, Jack McCall. The hand of cards which he supposedly held at the time of his death (black aces and eights) has become known as the “Dead Man’s Hand”.

On March 5, 1876, Hickok married Agnes Thatcher Lake, a 50-year-old circus proprietor in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.  Hickok left his new bride a few months later, joining Charlie Utter’s wagon train to seek his fortune in the gold fields of South Dakota.  Martha Jane Cannary, known popularly as Calamity Jane, claimed in her autobiography that she was married to Hickok and had divorced him so he could be free to marry Agnes Lake, but no records have been found that support Jane’s account.  The two were believed to have met for the first time after Jane was released from the guardhouse in Fort Laramie and joined the wagon train in which Hickok was traveling.  The wagon train arrived in Deadwood in July, 1876.  Jane herself confirmed this account in an 1896 newspaper interview, although she claimed she had been hospitalized with illness rather than in the guardhouse.   Shortly before Hickok’s death, he wrote a letter to his new wife, which read in part, “Agnes Darling, if such should be we never meet again, while firing my last shot, I will gently breathe the name of my wife—Agnes—and with wishes even for my enemies I will make the plunge and try to swim to the other shore.”

Today is the birthday of Georges Rouault (Georges Henri Rouault; Paris 27 May 1871 – 13 February 1958 Paris); painter, draughtsman, and printer, whose work is often associated with Fauvism and Expressionism. At right is Errege Zabarra (1916-1937), Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg and Femme enceinte devant le miroir (1906), Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

Gallery

la femme italienne

1905, Jeu de massacre (Slaughter), (Forains, Cabotins, Pitres), (La noce à Nini patte en l’air), watercolor, gouache, India ink and pastel on paper, 53 x 67 cm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Odalisque

Fille I, vue arrière avec des bas rouges

And today is the birthday of Linda Pastan (The Bronx; May 27, 1932 – January 30, 2023 Chevy Chase, Maryland); poet of Jewish background. From 1991 to 1995 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland.  She was known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships. Her final collection of poetry was Almost an Elegy, published in 2022.

Verse

I rock and rock
in the warm amnesia of the sun.
When my griefs sing to me
from the bright throats of thrushes
I sing back.

— “Old Woman”

Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them. (…)

Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
these vanishing years, filled with years.’

– “Consider the Space Between Stars”

You must rock your pain in your arms
until it’s asleep, then leave it

in a darkened room
and tiptoe out.

For a moment you will feel
the emptiness of peace.

But in the next room
your pain is already stirring.

Soon it will be
calling your name.

“Instruction”

I came across somethin’ Tennessee Williams wrote that I thought you would appreciate.  I know you feel a magnetic pull towards The Big Easy and the moon, as do I.  I think this will help explain:

“New Orleans and the moon have always seemed to me to have an understanding between them, an intimacy of sisters grown old together, no longer needing more than a speechless look to communicate their feelings to each other.  This lunar aosphere of the city draws me back whenever the waves of energy which removed me to more vital towns have spent themselves and a time of recession is called for.  Each time I have felt some rather profound psychic wound, a loss or failure, I have returned to this city.  At such periods I would seem to belong there and no place else in the country.”

The Angel in the Alcove
Tennessee Williams

Today’s love song comes from Guy Clark – Like a Coat from the Cold

Mac Tag

Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper or a courtship.  Walt Whitman

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?  Sylvia Plath

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Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us of Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Howzit goin’ Z?  Same same here; chores, readin’, writin’, drinkin’ some cold beer.  Probably have some red wine and a steak later.  In other words, the typical life for a solitary cowboy.  Be good to yourself.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

let this be our guide

to keep tryin’
to come near
to not be denied

accept the pain
show not feelin’s
to others,
only to you

if you look
you will see
not far away
maybe you will,
most of all

touched
by the tenderness
and ask why

because we know

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

il mio tutto

how to express
what cannot be

i could write
how do i love thee ilk
but to what avail

beauty and sorrow,
sisters, each ready
to step in and take
their place at your side

how quickly…
from heights,
to depths

i have been intimate
with both
and they and you
remain
my only need

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

need, helluva thing
i go there when i can…
that time by the ocean
when we shared a room
for the first time. mornin’
sun paints the bright scene
even brighter. sea breeze
billows the white curtains
a dream, arm in arm, bodies
fit naturally, as meant to be.
above our bodies, fan blades
turn, a slow shadow dance
on the ceilin’. the tidal rise
and fall of our breathin’,
the afterglow of need

one more time,
dare ask the silence

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Il mio rifugio
Il mio confidente
Il mio Tutto

How to express
that which cannot
be put into words…
I could write
how do I love thee
all day long and still
not git it right

Joy and Sorrow,
sisters, each ready
to step in and take
their place at your side

How quickly…
from the heights of joy
to the depths of sorrow
I have been intimate
with both, but for too long
Sorrow has been my mistress

How I wish for Joy to return
How I long for you my muse

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Everything i

ever wanted

reverberates

in my mind when

I am with you

© 2015 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

On this day in 1897 – Dracula, a novel by the Irish author Bram Stoker, is published.  Of course, the book is famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula.  The novel tells the story of Dracula’s attempt to move from Transylvania to England, so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.  Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel, and invasion literature.  Stoker did not invent the vampire but he defined its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film, and television interpretations. 

Select Quotes from Dracula (1897)

• I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
  Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation.
  “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!”
  • Jonathan Harker’s journal

• I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.
  • Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker

• We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.
  • Dracula to Jonathan Harker

• Listen to them — children of the night. What music they make.
  • Dracula referring to the howling of the wolves to Jonathan Harker.

• No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
  • Jonathan Harker

• Despair has its own calms.
  • Jonathan Harker

• Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
  • Professor Abraham Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward

• He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.
  • Dr. John Seward

• Van Helsing and I came on here. The moment we were alone in the carriage he gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He has denied to me since that it was hysterics, and insisted that it was only his sense of humour asserting itself under very terrible conditions. He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge; and then he cried, till he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but it had no effect. Men and women are so different in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness! Then when his face grew grave and stern again I asked him why his mirth, and why at such a time. His reply was in a way characteristic of him, for it was logical and forceful and mysterious. He said:—
  “Ah, you don’t comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.’ Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave — laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say ‘Thud, thud!’ to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy — that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man — not even you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son — yet even at such a moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, ‘Here I am! here I am!’ till the blood come dance back and bring some of the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall — all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.”
  • Dr. Seward’s Diary entry for 22 September

• “Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust. If you could have looked into my very heart then when I want to laugh; if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him — for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time — maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of all.”
  I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.
  “Because I know!”
  • Professor Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward, in Dr. Seward’s Diary entry for 22 September

• You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera.
  • Professor Van Helsing to Dr. Seward

• One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever.
  • Dr. Seward of Lucy Westenra

• I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.
  • The Keeper in the Zoological Gardens

• You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!
  • Dracula, having found Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood in his house

• The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
  • Mina Harker

• Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.
  • Jonathan Harker

And today is the birthday of Dorothea Lange (Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; Hoboken, New Jersey; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965 San Francisco); documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.

Gallery

Photo by Robert King.

 

Woman of the High Plains, Texas, June 1938

The daughter of a migrant coal miner living in the American River Camp, California, November 1936

Mac Tag

My love for you is more athletic than a verb. 

Sylvia Plath

Joy, in growing deeper and more deep,

Walks in the vesture of her sister Sorrow.

W.B. Yeats

Continue reading

cowboy coleridge, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, love letter, muse, sisters joy and sorrow, sylvia plath, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, wb yeats

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021.2023  mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

this, no ordinary place
where we make
what we can

and you say
and you are

and i say,
yes,
give me more

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the particulars
of the pursuit
of the all mighty tender,
of domesticity,
not my measure

these i better
in this, best
thoughts
of you
this verse

and havin’ this
and this alone
of more delight
i cannot imagine

you know the answer
as i do

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

describe
when kissed finally

the dark days behind,
the edge of hope,
the curve of your lips

far more desire

then the way
breath becomes
urgent and the cries

soon, no stoppin’
then all at once
complete

as if always
meant to be,
graspin’, then
lettin’ go

believin’ again

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved.

Pass the black cottonwoods,
and enterin’ the sage,
climbin’ the gradual slope
Direction kept in line
with a western star
From time to time
stoppin’ to listen…
only the familiar bark
of coyote and sweep
of wind and rustle of sage
Presently an outcroppin’
of rocks looms up darkly
Climbin’ over the rock,
then down to where
it is sheltered
from the wind
Usin’ a saddle for a pillow,
rolled in blankets,
face upward to the stars
In that wild covert,
eyes shut, comparin’
their loneliness to mine,
Sleep comes

© copyright 2016 Mac tag all rights reserved

And, how about a great love poem today?  Who amongst us does not love Shakespeare?  Can I get a hell yeah for Will!  His plays and sonnets are among my favorite things to read.  If I could only own one book if might be his collected works.  This is dedicated to you.  Rhett

Sonnet 91

by William Shakespeare

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force;
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away, and me most wretched make.

“Sonnet 91” by William Shakespeare.  Public domain.

Click Here For Zazie’s Reply

Today is the birthday of Carlo (or Carlino) Dolci (Florence May 1616 – 17 January 1686 Florence); painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Florence, known for highly finished religious pictures, often repeated in many versions.

Gallery

Self portrait

Salome and Head of St. John the Baptist

Annuciation Angel

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson in 1857

Today is the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882 Concord); essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.  He was seen as a champion of individualism and a critic of the countervailing pressures of society.  Emerson disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.  He formulated and expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, “Nature”.  Emerson gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”.  His first two collections of essays Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844—represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet” and “Experience”.  In my opinion, he is one of the linchpins of the American romantic movement.

I hung my verse in the wind
Time and tide their faults will find.

The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
‘T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

• “Ode,” Complete Works (1883), vol. 9, p. 73.

• Give all to love;
  Obey thy heart;
  Friends, kindred, days,
  Estate, good fame,
  Plans, credit, and the muse;
  Nothing refuse.
  • Give All to Love, st. 1.
• Though thou loved her as thyself,
  As a self of purer clay,
  Tho’ her parting dims the day,
  Stealing grace from all alive,
  Heartily know,
  When half-gods go,
  The gods arrive.
  • Give All to Love, st. 4.

He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

• Beauty

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes;
The lover rooted stays.

• Friendship

Louise de Broglie, Countess d’Haussonville
Portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville by Ingres(1845)

Today is the birthday of Louise de Broglie, Countess d’Haussonville (Coppet, Switzerland 25 May 1818 – 21 April 1882 Paris); essayist and biographer, and a member of the House of Broglie, a distinguished French family. A granddaughter of the novelist Germaine de Staël, she was considered independent, liberal, and outspoken. Her 1845 portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which took three years to complete, has been exhibited in the Frick Collection in New York City since the 1930s.

Louise wrote an unpublished autobiography recounting a highly cultured education and upbringing. From an early age, she was enthusiastic about literature and music, opera in particular—Ingres would later include opera glasses in her portrait. Notably intellectual, she was said to have read every new book. At age 11, she attended the opening night of Victor Hugo’s play “Hernani”, famous for the demonstrations it provoked; as a young pianist, she had personally known Chopin. She was also considered a talented watercolorist.

In October 1836 at age 18, she married the future French National Assembly member and historian Joseph d’Haussonville (1809–1884). “I was destined to beguile, to attract, to seduce, and in the final reckoning to cause suffering in all those who sought their happiness in me”, Louise wrote; “I wanted to marry young and have a brilliant position in society. And that, basically, was the only reason I wanted to marry him”, she said. Whatever her initial sentiments, the marriage seems to have evolved into a happy one.

Louise and her husband first met Ingres in Rome in 1840, while he was directing the French Academy in Rome and living at the Villa Medici. They became convinced of his suitability to paint her portrait after viewing his recently completed Antiochus and Stratonice (today in the Condé Museum).

Ingres, figure study, circa 1844

Ingres, figure study, 1844

 Ingres, study, circa 1844

 Enlarged detail of the Countess’s head and left hand, showing her hand’s impossible reflection in the mirror

Many critics have noted the anatomical impossibility of Louise’s pose, her right arm seeming to originate at her left shoulder. It would also be impossible to see Louise’s raised hand in the mirror’s reflection, though Ingres included it.

 

Theodore Roethke

Today is the birthday of Theodore Huebner Roethke (Saginaw, Michigan, May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963 Bainbridge Island, Washington); poet.  He published several volumes of award-winning and critically acclaimed poetry.  In my opinon; one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation.  Roethke’s work is characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery.  He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking, and he won the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1959 for Words for the Wind and posthumously in 1965 for The Far Field.  In the November 1968 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author James Dickey wrote Roethke was: “in my opinion the greatest poet this country has yet produced.”

Open House (1941)

• The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
  Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.
  • “The Light Comes Brighter,” ll. 1-2

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

• Over the gulfs of dream
  Flew a tremendous bird
  Further and further away
  Into a moonless black,
  Deep in the brain, far back.
  • “Night Crow,” ll. 4-

• Voice, come out of the silence.
  Say something.
  Appear in the form of a spider
  Or a moth beating the curtain.Tell me:
  Which is the way I take;
  Out of what door do I go,
  Where and to whom?
  • The Lost Son, ll. 24 – 29

• The salt said, look by the sea,
  Your tears are not enough praise,
  You will find no comfort here,
  In the kingdom of bang and blab.
  • The Lost Son, ll. 32 – 35

• The mind moved, not alone,
  Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?

Was it light within?

Was it light within light?

Stillness becoming alive,

Yet still?

• The Lost Son, ll. 161 – 167

• A lively understandable spirit
  Once entertained you.
  It will come again.
  Be still.
  Wait.
  • The Lost Son,” ll. 168-172

• I saw the separateness of all things!
  My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
  The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
  • “A Field of Light,” ll. 45-47

• The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
  A voice sang:

Pleasure on ground

Has no sound,

Easily maddens

The uneasy man.

• “The Shape of the Fire,” ll. 40 – 45

• Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
  Renew the light, lewd whisper.
  • “The Shape of the Fire,” ll. 54 – 55

• The wasp waits.
  The edge cannot eat the center.
  The grape listens.
  The path tells little to the serpent.
  An eye comes out of the wave.
  The journey from flesh is longest.
  A rose sways least.
  The redeemer comes a dark way.
  • “The Shape of the Fire,” ll. 56-63

• Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
  Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
  Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
  The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
  And love, love sang toward.
  • “The Shape of the Fire,” ll. 73-77

• To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
  When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
  To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
  Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
  To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.
  • The Shape of the Fire,” ll. 88-92

Praise to the End! (1951)

• I’ll seek my own meekness.
  What grace I have is enough.
  The lost have their own pace.
  The stalks ask something else.
  What the grave says,
  The nest denies.
  • “Unfold! Unfold!,” ll. 59-64

• Bless me and the maze I’m in!
  Hello, thingy spirit.
  • “I Cry, Love! Love!,” ll. 20-21

• Beginnings start without shade,
  Thinner than minnows.
  The live grass whirls with the sun,
  Feet run over the simple stones,
  There’s time enough.
  Behold, in the lout’s eye, love.
  • “I Cry, Love! Love!,” ll. 33-39

The Waking (1953)

• I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
  I take it and I give it back again:
  For other tunes and other wanton beats
  Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
  Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
  That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
  • “Four for Sir John Davies,” ll. 19-24

• Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
  Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
  Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, —
  Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
  All lovers live by longing, and endure:
  Summon a vision and declare it pure.
  • “Four for Sir John Davies,” ll. 73-78

The Waking

• I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
  I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
  I learn by going where I have to go.

• Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
  The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

• Great Nature has another thing to do
  To you and me; so take the lively air,
  And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

• This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
  What falls away is always. And is near.
  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
  I learn by going where I have to go.

Words for the Wind (1958)

• I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
  When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
  Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
  The shapes a bright container can contain!
  • “I Knew a Woman,” ll. 1 – 4

• Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
  I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
  What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
  I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
  But who would count eternity in days?
  These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
  (I measure time by how a body sways.)
  • “I Knew a Woman,” ll. 22-28

• Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
  And found out what I could of all desire;
  I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
  In the deep center of the voice and fire.
• I know the motion of the deepest stone.
  Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
  • “The Sententious Man,” ll. 31-36

• The night wind rises. Does my father live?
  Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul.
  My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
  Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
  • “The Renewal,” ll. 7-10

• I lived with deep roots once:
  Have I forgotten their ways —
  The gradual embrace
  Of lichen around stones?
  • “Plaint,” ll. 13-16

• I have gone into the waste lonely places
  Behind the eye.
  • “Meditations of an Old Woman: First Meditation,” ll. 76-77

The Far Field (1964)

• Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;
  Too close immediacy an exhaustion
  • “The Abyss”

• A terrible violence of creation,
  A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
  Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,
  The burning lake turns into a forest pool,
  The fire subsides into rings of water,
  A sunlit silence.
  • “The Abyss”

• Being, not doing, is my first joy.
  • “The Abyss,” l. 100

• Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
  What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
  • “The Marrow,” ll. 11-12

• Let others probe the mystery if they can.
  Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will —
  The right thing happens to the happy man.
  • “The Right Thing,” ll. 1-3

• And I dance with William Blake
  For love, for Love’s sake;And everything comes to One,
  As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
  • Once More, the Round,” 

Today is the birthday of Will Barnet (Beverly, Massachusetts; May 25, 1911 – November 13, 2012 New York City); artist known for his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints depicting the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds.

  Barnet married twice; his first wife Mary Sinclair and his second, Elena Barnet.

  Within his oeuvre one can chart the evolution of American painting trends of which Will was on the forefront, as well as the joys and vicissitudes of his personal life, with his first marriage ending in divorce and his second marriage providing a more stable family life, reflected in the harmonious compositions of domestic tranquility of his later work.

Gallery

Woman by the sea 1973

Edge of the world

Way to the sea

And today is the birthday of Raymond Carver (Raymond Clevie Carver Jr.; Clatskanie, Oregon; May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988 Port Angeles, Washington); short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s. Carver’s first wife was Maryann Burk. The fall of their marriage began with Carver’s trip to Missoula, Mont., in 1972 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge’s birthday party. “That’s when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.” By fall of 1974, Maryann wrote, “he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes”. Friends urged her to leave Raymond. “But I couldn’t. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I’d do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always.” She describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of ’78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. “It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving.” So he wrote a letter instead. “I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.”Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers’ conference in Dallas, Texas, in November 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas; in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington; and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher had been appointed the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read “Writers At Work” in order to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced. He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

• Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He’d said he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
• There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
• “Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”
• “All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”
• A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.
• “My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.”
• Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey.

Mac Tag

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Love, ralph waldo emerson, raymond carver, sonnet, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, theodore roethke, William Shakespeare

Dear Z, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his Muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the first time
She came to me
i was asleep
in my bed

i felt Her lay
next to me
i felt Her hands
runnin’ up and down
my body

i was instantly
aroused
as never before

when She was through
with me, She left me
in a cold sweat
wantin’ more

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

on the border of the Llano,
down by the river,
late at night
you can still hear Her
a moan, a sigh, a cry
some say it is the wind
or coyotes
but i believe
in the weepin’,
in La Llorona

i believe grief
is strong enough
to make the livin’
and the not,
do things
that cannot
be explained

and i know this,
from a lifetime
of intimate dances,
you cannot outrun it

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

In Mexican folklore, La Llorona (American Spanish: [la ʝoˈɾona]; “The Weeping Woman” or “The Wailer”) is a vengeful ghost who roams waterfront areas mourning her children whom she drowned.

The legend has a wide variety of details and versions. In a typical version of the legend, a beautiful woman named María marries a rich ranchero / conquistador to whom she bears two children. One day, María sees her husband with another woman and in a fit of blind rage, she drowns their children in a river, which she immediately regrets. Unable to save them and consumed by guilt, she drowns herself as well but is unable to enter the afterlife, forced to be in purgatory and roam this earth until she finds her children.  In another version of the story, her children are illegitimate, and she drowns them so that their father cannot take them away to be raised by his new wife.  Recurring themes in variations on the La Llorona myth include a white, wet dress, nocturnal wailing, and an association with water.

The mother archetype of La Llorona has been tied to patriarchal expectations of women in Mexican culture by several authors, historians, and social critics. Social critics often consider Mexican (and Mexican-American) culture to force patriarchal standards onto women, such as being defined by their roles as mothers. La Llorona’s falling into the trope of an “evil” or “failed” mother, having either committed infanticide or having failed to save them from drowning, can be considered a reflection of this.

You know that I am all about celebratin’ beauty in whatever form it manifests itself, so today’s letter features more art, poetry and a famed beauty born in 17th century England.

Pontormo
Illustration from “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” by Giorgio Vasari, edition of 1568.

Today is the birthday of Jacopo Carucci (Pontorme, May 24, 1494 – January 2, 1557 Florence), usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo; Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine School.  His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the art of the Florentine Renaissance.  He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment.

Gallery

 Visitation, 1514-16; Fresco; 392 x 337 cm; SS. Annunziata, Florence

 Joseph in Egypt, 1515-18; Oil on wood; 96 x 109 cm; National Gallery, London.

 Deposition from the Cross, 1525-1528

 Annunciation, fresco

 Christ and Creation of Eve

Study for Deluge

Dead in Last Judgment

 Portrait of Maria Salviati, the wife of famous military leader Giovanni delle Bande Nere de’ Medici, and Giulia, a Medici relative who was left in Maria’s care after the murder of the child’s father. Walters Art Museum

 Portrait of a Halberdier, 1528-1530; Oil on canvas, 92 x 72 cm; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

On this day in 1725, Jane Leveson-Gower Hyde passed away.  She was known as a famous beauty celebrated by her contemporaries.  The author Jonathan Swift referred to her as “my principal goddess.”   Others called her “majestically fair.”  Hmmm, reminds me of someone……  Every woman should know what it is like to be someone’s goddess.  You are mine.

Alexei Savrasov
Portrait of Savrasov by Vasily Perov, 1878

Today is the birthday of Alexei Savrasov (Alexei Kondratyevich SavrasovMoscow, May 24, 1830 – October 8, 1897 Moscow); Russian landscape painter and creator of the lyrical landscape style.

Gallery

 The Rooks Have Come Back was painted by Savrasov near Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.

• 

  View of the Kremlin from the Krymsky Bridge in Inclement Weather (1851)

• 

  View in the Neighborhood of Oranienbaum (1854)

• 

  Landscape with River and Angler (1859)

• 

  Rustic View (1867)

• 

  Winter Night (1869)

• 

  Winter (1870)

• 

  Sundown over a marsh, 1871

• 

  Monastery of Caves near Nizhny Novgorod (1871)

• 

  Rainbow (1873)

• 

  Spring Day, 1873

• 

  Rafts (1873)

• 

  Monastery Gates (1875)

• 

  Early Spring. Thaw. (1880s)

• 

  Spring. Kitchen Gardens (1893)

• 

  Rasputitsa (Sea of Mud, 1894)

O céu nos deu duas coisas para equilibrar as múltiplas misérias da vida: a esperança e o sono.  (Heaven gave us two things to balance the multiple miseries of life: hope and sleep.)  – Voltaire

It is as if he is the perfect male counterpart to my own self: each of us giving the other an extension of the life we believe in living.  – Sylvia Plath

To living a life you believe in with your perfect counterpart,

Mac Tag

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Alexei Savrasov, beauty, cowboy coleridge, goddess, Jane Leveson-Gower Hyde, jonathan swift, muse, pontormo, quotes, sylvia plath, the lovers chronicle, voltaire