The Lovers’ Chronicle 7 January – the kiss – art by Albert Bierstadt & Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret – birth of Zora Neale Hurston

Dear Muse, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Is there a kiss that did not happen in your life that you regret? Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

dream scheme…
Music starts up, he recognizes, “As Time Goes By”, Frank’s version
He is wearing a white tuxedo dinner jacket, having a martini at a bar
A beautiful red head approaches, he notices she is dressed just like Ilsa
He looks around the bar realizin’ they are at Rick’s in Casablanca
The song is still playing as he buys her a drink, she says thanks, but don’t call me kid
He laughs and wakes up next to the beautiful red head
Rolling next to her, his arm over her, he hears the music in his head;
“You must remember this”

several songs come to mind
the one i picked when i first
posted years ago, from the movie
The Last of the Mohicans,
the instrumental theme song
“Good movie, good song”
the love story of Cora and Hawkeye
and other stuff, a war, people dyin’
“Oh so a rom-drama”
if you want we could watch the movie
or do a reenactment of the scene where they kiss
“Pucker up baby”

we must have been busy on this day in 2021, how else to explain not writin’ about the most important one, cannot blame covid, it was a thursday so easily coulda been my work, for you know i did too much of that, i have written about the one we shared in a parkin’ lot in downtown decatur, the one that changed us forever, the last first one

of course “the one” came
discovered the cold, cold heart
had some life in it yet

of all the encounters on this ride
the only welcomed surprise
has come from you
the trail behind is littered
with debris of disappointment
from the unwelcomed ones
i s’pose a lesson in holdin’ on
you never know what is comin’

Pale Love, Pale Rider

for Tamela

i was convinced
it was gonna happen
the time together
felt so right
we were progressin’
toward that moment
until we were not

or so it seemed

separated by miles
and relationships
then years later
there we were
at rocky top
of course
and yes
it was better
than imagined

happy birthday
let it carry us away

still doin’ a solo waltz ’round the dance floor
so that precludes any encounter with “the”
since last we were here a year ago
focus remains on work, writin’,
gittin’ through another
High Plains winter

yes, sometimes wonder
will there ever be one
my feelin’s are as cold
as the snowbank outside
will someone come and thaw them

oh there have been some,
never one that would warrant “the”
but none here in solitude thanks
that is really the furthest thought
at this point, perhaps in dreams
i might indulge, if they come
never one to be coy or pass
up romantic opportunities
but only apparitions need apply

windmill with Angus cattle
Oklahoma high plains

reached 60 degrees
yesterday, so road trippin’
with the roof open,
on the Southern High Plains

the feelin’s were there
from that first day
i had given them up
for dead, so imagine
my surprise
when they awoke

wait,
that is not quite right
they stormed back
with a vengeance

but of course,
there was no figurin’
you walkin’ in that day

have never set foot
on the Spanish Steps
but i have knelt
in the dirt at the site
where Buddy Holly died

and i have kissed
a pretty woman
‘neath a lamppost
in the French Quarter

P.S.
happy birthday
you have no idea
how much i miss you
and the kiss
that never happened

Sometimes
Out on the plain
I lay down with
My daydreams
All things merge
In my thoughts
On a continuous
Canvas of nascent
Sketches and verses

***

That is what they do
Love you, despise you
In alternatin’
Confusin’ currents

***

She looked her last
Upon the horseman
Lips faintly parted
Eyes plainly sayin’
I am yours

Billie’s music
Pourin’ over
Me and whisky
Pourin’ over
Ice. Gonna drown
Myself or these
Blues, whichever,
Mercifully,
Comes first, Amen

Accordin’ to my friend Jett, dreams come true, sort of. Due to certain circumstances, Jett is not with the one he longs to be with. He is reduced to each night fallin’ asleep hopin’ the one he wants will come to him in his dreams. Last night he was lucky and his dream came true; she came into his dreams. He told me about the dream and y’all know how we love dreams here at TLC, so we are tryin’ to work that into a poem for a future TLC. Stay tuned for that.

Meanwhile muse, here is today’s Poem of the Day. A poem you should remember from our past.

The Kiss

I have known some girls
I wanted to kiss and I did
Before and after the fall
But there was this one girl,

Though I wanted to I did not,
I never kissed at all

Now all the kisses
And the girls that were
Have fallen by the way
But the thought of the kiss
That never was
Haunts me night and day

The Song of the Day is “The Kiss” the theme from the film The Last of the Mohicans. Disclaimer: We do not own the rights to this song. No copyright infringement intended.

Today is the birthday of Albert Bierstadt (Solingen, Rhine Province, Prussia; January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902 New York City); painter best known for his sweeping landscapes of the American West. To paint the scenes, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.

Bierstadt was brought to the United States at the age of one by his parents. He later studied painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along this scenic river. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran, is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.

In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government. He returned to a studio he had taken at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he traveled west again, this time in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry.

Gallery

Oregon Trail (Campfire), 1863

Cloud Study, Moonlight c1860

Rue à Nassau 1878

Rocky Mountain Landscape, in the White House.

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Rosalie Bierstadt, unknown date.

Roman Fish Market. Arch of Octavius. De Young Museum, San Francisco, California
Staubbach Falls, Near Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, 1865
Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Park, c. 1868, Oakland Museum, Oakland, California
Storm in the Mountains, c. 1870, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA
Mount Adams, Washington, 1875, Princeton University Art Museum
Mount Corcoran, c. 1876–77, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Gosnold at Cuttyhunk (c. 1858), New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA
The Marina Piccola, Capri (1859), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Indians Spear Fishing, 1862
The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York
Looking Down Yosemite Valley (1865), Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
Lake Tahoe (1868), Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sierra Nevada (c. 1871–1873), Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie (1866), Brooklyn Museum, New York
California Spring, 1875, De Young Museum, San Francisco, California
Light in the Forest, unknown date

Today is the birthday of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret; Paris 7 January 1852 – 3 July 1929 Quincey, France); one of the leading artists of the naturalist school.

From 1869 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme. From 1875 he exhibited at the Salon, where in 1880 he won the first-class medal for the painting “An Accident” and a medal of honour in 1885 for “Horses at the Watering Trough”. From the 1880s Dagnan-Bouveret along with Gustave Courtois, maintained a studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a fashionable suburb of Paris. By that time he was recognized as a leading modern artist known for his peasant scenes, but also for his mystical-religious compositions. His large-scale painting “The Last Supper” was exhibited at the Salon de Champ-de-Mars in 1896. He was one of the first to use the then new medium of photography to bring greater realism to his paintings. In 1891 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour and in 1900 he became a member of the Institut de France. A number of his pictures were purchased by the British art collector George McCulloch, including The Madonna and Child 1880, Dans Le Foret, and a copy of La Cene (The Last Supper).

Gallery

c.1900. From the Figures contemporaines tirées de l’Album Mariani

La mort de Manon Lescaut

Marguerite au Sabbat, 1911

Bouder – Gustave Courtois dans son atelier

The Duet, 1883

A Young Man and Woman Gaze Out a Window, 1877

Chimères

Ophelia, 1900

On the Summit, 1903

Watercolourist in the Louvre, c. 1889

A Woman from Bern, Switzerland, 1887, portrait of the artist’s wife

Woman from Brittany, 1886

Portrait of a Brittany Girl, 1887

Breton Women at a Pardon, 1887

Young Woman in Pink with her Child, 1882

In the Meadow, 1892

And today is the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (Notasulga, Alabama; January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960 Fort Pierce, Florida); novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of Hurston’s four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is perhaps best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community’s identity.

She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston’s works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston’s death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker published an article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (later retitled “Looking for Zora”), in the March issue of Ms. magazine that year. Then, in 2001, Hurston’s manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published in 2018.

In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and a former teacher at Howard; he later became a physician. Their marriage ended in 1931. In 1935, Hurston was involved with Percy Punter, a graduate student at Columbia University. He inspired the character of Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA in Florida, she married Albert Price. The marriage ended after a few months, but they did not divorce until 1943. The following year, Hurston married James Howell Pitts of Cleveland. That marriage, too, lasted less than a year.

Verse

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
- Ch. 1, p. 9.
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.
- C. 2, p. 10.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
- Ch. 3, p. 21.

Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
- Ch. 20, p. 193.
Bare and bony of comfort and love.
I used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees, which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon. It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace.

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

Mac Tag

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart
- W. B. Yeats

The Lovers’ Chronicle 7 January – the kiss – art by Albert Bierstadt & Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret – birth of Zora Neale Hurston