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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Has your someday come?  What leaves you breathless?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

must i be reminded
yes, i need it
it is the only way
to feel anything

it comes down like this
contentment
or somethin’
damn near like it

what else could issue thus

bring on the night,
ring out the hour
the days wear on
but this endures

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

have you ever wished
that  someone
would take you away

someday
someone will come and stay
someday……
then you will feel,
À bout de souffle,
at breath’s end

miss feelin’ breathless
when you were near

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

someday came and left
miss feelin’ breathless
when you were near

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Two more poems.  The first inspired by somethin’ you once said to me and the second inspired by a movie I recently watched; the 1960 French film À bout de souffle (Breathless) featurin’ the lovely and talented Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Consider this the official notification that this film belongs on the must-see film list.

Do you remember when you said you wished someone would take you away?

Someday

Someday
Love will find a way
Someday
Love will come your way
Someday
Love will take you away
Someday
Love will save the day
Someday
Love will come and stay
Someday……

Then you will feel,

À bout de souffle, at breath’s end,

Breathless

Breathless
All over tremblin’
Breathless

Holdin’ on believin’

Breathless
Carried away gettin’
Breathless
Givin’ in to the feelin’
Breathless
Not fearin’ bein’
Breathless……

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The two songs of the day are “Someday” by Tegan and Sara and “Breathless” by The Corrs.

My someday came and left.  I miss feelin’ breathless when you were near.

Giorgi “Gigo” Ivanes dze Gabashvili (Tbilisi, Georgia; November 9, 1862 – October 28, 1936 Tsikhisdziri, Georgia); painter, educator and photgrapher. One of the earliest Georgian representatives of the Realist School of Georgian painting, his work is known for covering a wide range of subjects, landscapes and scenes of everyday life through orientalist lens. Although not widely known in the West, Gabashvili’s paintings are highly valued.

His photographic archive was unknown until 2012.  The photographs were taken in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was a time when photography and even art as a whole had to comply with Soviet ideology. Gabashivili’s works mainly included nude photographs of women, which was completely unacceptable. Perhaps that is the reason for late display of his works as a photographer.

Gallery

Today is the birthday of Robert Frank (Zürich; November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019 Inverness, Nova Scotia.); photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society. Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans “changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ … ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century.”  Frank later expanded into film and video and exerimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised.  Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank’s co-director, Alfred Leslie, revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.

In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal’s basement while filming The Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K. Gutman. Isaac Babel’s story was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm in New Jersey. It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and around New Brunswick, but Frank ended up shooting for six months.

Frank’s 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues, is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones on tour, engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Frank said of the Stones, “It was great to watch them — the excitement. But my job was after the show. What I was photographing was a kind of boredom. It’s so difficult being famous. It’s a horrendous life. Everyone wants to get something from you.”  Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.” The Stones sued to prevent the film’s release, and it was disputed whether Frank as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist owned the copyright. A court order restricted the film to being shown no more than five times per year, and only in the presence of Frank.  Frank’s photography also appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main St.

Gallery

• We are all writing God’s poem.
  • As quoted by Erica Jong, in “Into the lion’s den” in The Guardian (26 October 2000)

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

• Even so, I must admire your skill.
  You are so gracefully insane.
  • “Elegy in the Classroom”
  • Referring to Robert Lowell

• Love your self’s self where it lives.
  There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
  why did I let you grow
  in another place. You did not know my voice
  when I came back to call. All the superlatives
  of tomorrow’s white tree and mistletoe
  will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.
  • “The Double Image”

• I rot on the wall, my own
  Dorian Gray.
  • “The Double Image”

• I imitate
  a memory of belief
  that I do not own.
  • “The Division of Parts”

• I have ridden in your cart, driver,
  waved my nude arms at villages going by,
  learning the last bright routes, survivor
  where your flames still bite my thigh
  and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
  A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
  I have been her kind.
  • “Her Kind”

All My Pretty Ones (1962)

• All who love have lied.
  • “The Operation”

• Fact: death too is in the egg.
  Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
  And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
  • “The Operation”

• Need is not quite belief.
  • “With Mercy for the Greedy”

• Dearest,
  although everything has happened,
  nothing has happened.
  • “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound”

• A woman who writes feels too much,
  those trances and portents!
  As if cycles and children and islands
  weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
  and vegetables were never enough.
  She thinks she can warm the stars.
  A writer is essentially a spy.
  Dear love, I am that girl.
  • “The Black Art”

• It would be pleasant to be drunk:
  faithless to my tongue and hands,
  giving up the boundaries
  for the heroic gin.
  Dead drunk is the term I think of,
  insensible,
  neither cool nor warm,
  without a head or foot.
  To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
  I will try it shortly.
  • “Letter Written During a January Northeaster”

• And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
  in their stone boats. They are more like stone
  than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
  to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
  • “The Truth the Dead Know”

• In a dream you are never eighty.
  • “Old”

Live or Die (1966)

• I was spread out daily
  and examined for flaws.
  • “Those Times…”

• I grow old on my bitterness.
  • “Two Sons”

• Love! That red disease —
  • “Menstruation at Forty”

• Why have your eyes gone into their own room?
  • “Your Face on the Dog’s Neck”

• But suicides have a special language.
  Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
  They never ask why build.
  • “Wanting to Die”

Love Poems (1969)

• My mouth blooms like a cut.
  I’ve been wronged all year, tedious
  nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
  and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
  crybaby, you fool!
  • “The Kiss”

• I am alive when your fingers are.
  • “The Breast”

• As for me, I am a watercolor.
  I wash off.
  • “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife”

• You said the anger would come back
  just as the love did.
  • Again and Again and Again”

• He puts his bones back on,
  Turning the clock back an hour.
  She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
  the unbound limbs, the boards,
  the roof, the removable roof.
  She is his selection, part time.
  You know the story too! Look,
  when it is over he places her,
  like a phone, back on the hook.
  • “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman”

• Catch me. I’m your disease.
  • “Eighteen Days Without You”: December 18th

Transformations (1971)

• Beauty is a simple passion,
  but, oh my friends, in the end
  you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
  • “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

The Book of Folly (1972)

• With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
  the mother, the child,
  and we three will color the stars black
  in memory of his mother
  who kept him chained to the food tree
  or turned him on and off like a water faucet
  and made women through all these hazy years
  the enemy with a heart of lies.
  • “The Wifebeater”

• In my sights I carve him
  like a sculptor. I mold out
  his last look at everyone.
  I carry his eyes and his
  brain bone at every position.
  I know his male sex and I do
  march over him with my index finger.
  His mouth and his anus are one.
  I am at the center of feeling.
  • “The Assassin”

• My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
  • “Killing the Spring”

A Small Journal (1974)

• It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
  • “The Poet’s Story,” January 1, 1972 entry

The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

• The tongue, the Chinese say,
  is like a sharp knife:
  it kills
  without drawing blood.
  • “The Dead Heart”

• I am, each day,
  typing out the God
  my typewriter believes in.
  Very quick. Very intense,
  like a wolf at a live heart.
  • “Frenzy”

45 Mercy Street (1976)

• What can I do with this memory?
  Shake the bones out of it?
  Defoliate the smile?
  Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
  Take the face of the man I love
  and squeeze my foot into it,
  when all the while my heart is making a museum?
  I love you the way the oboe plays.
  I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
  I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
  Yet I fear you,
  as one in the desert fears the sun.
  • “Waking Alone” from The Divorce Papers

• I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
  I am pushing knives through the hands
  that created two into one.
  Our hands do not bleed at this,
  they lie still in their dishonor.
  • “Killing the Love” from The Divorce Papers

• I am stuffing your mouth with your
  promises and watching
  you vomit them out upon my face.
  • “Killing the Love”

• There is rust in my mouth,
  the stain of an old kiss.
  • “The Lost Lie” from The Divorce Papers

Words for Dr. Y (1978)

• Death,
  I need my little addiction to you.
  need that tiny voice who,
  even as I rise from the sea,
  all woman, all there,
  says kill me, kill me.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• I begin again, Dr.Y,
  this neverland journal,
  full of my own sense of filth.
  Why else keep a journal, if not
  to examine your own filth?
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• God is only mocked by believers.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

• We all walk softly away.
  We would stay and be the nurse but
  there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
  It is love that walks away
  and yet we have terrible mouths
  and soft milk hands.
  We worry with like.
  We walk away like love.
  • “To Like, To Love”

• To love another is something
  like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
  into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
  • “Admonitions to a Special Person” (1974) from Last Poems

Mac Tag

I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:

It worked at them, day out, day in,

Building a sorrowful loveliness

Out of the battles of old times

– WB Yeats

Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face. – Anne Sexton

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anne sexton, breathless, cowboy coleridge, jean seberg, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, someday, someday breathless, song of the day, tegan and sara, the corrs, the lovers almanac, wb yeats, Zazie