Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  What do you know?  Have you told that someone what you know?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

dream knowin’
hey, transported again, not my bed, those are stars overhead, this is my bedroll, campin’ on the High Plains
the crackle of the fire and the wind, all that can be heard
there appear to be words, a song ridin’ on the wind;
“Do you know where you’re going to?”
i did not for most of my life, but i do now;
“Do you like the things that life is showing you?”
another two-fold answer, i thought i did but i did not know what i was lookin’ for, but now i do;
“Where are you going to?”
that is very clear now;
“Do you know?”
absolutely
Hello my love, says the fabulous redhead, what are you doing
talkin’ to the wind about you

© copyright 2024 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

oh yes you do
“We do”
no song lyrics leap to mind
“Without don’t, I agree”
how many do and how often
do those, find someone who does
“I hope it’s not rare”
for dramatic effect
and for the dark spot i have,
it does not happen often
“All the more reason
we sould feel fortunate”
that we do

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

you and this are all that matters, not willin’ to claim knowin’ anything else, read back a couple of years and you will find all the drama you want and did not care if anyone else knew, was not worth lettin’ the wall down to let anyone in, nothin’ to be gained from any kind of intimacy, till you

© copyright 2022.2024 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

we know

wish and need

think and want

what will be
after years
of yearnin’

where we will be

hope and dream
believe and know

i am here
more near to you
than anyone

no longer sundered
hopes came true,
and we can find
what was meant for us,
what only together
we can know

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

all posturin’ aside
this is all that is known
we could make a list
yes, seems rather gauche
always playin’ cool and quiet
the verse says all that needs to be said
want to talk about knowin’ anything else
no, nothin’ else can be with any certainty
workin’ our way towards lower expectations
you know that

© copyright 2020.2024 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you know that i am
more near to you
than anyone

spent years,
too many,
afraid to look
in some of the rooms
in my mind

not fearful anymore
been in all of ’em
finally figured out
i just had to write
to make sense of it all

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

all these years
all these memories
it has been you

you know
that i am

what means it then
to be sundered so
if hopes are true
if expectancy
breaks down
what between stands

for bein’ without
is endurable
because you know

be not, therefore
need not burn
need not cry
come
that we may know
what was meant to be

***

on the day
Charpentier died…
come, be my Louise
and I will be your Julien
and we will live each day
as if it matters

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboycoleridge

i sure ain’t found
the answer
truth is,
i never understood
the language
b’lieve i will stick
with horses

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboycoleridge

only ever good
at the fallin’ part
never could figure
out the stayin’ part
so got pretty good
at the leavin’ part

***

forgot that he could fly
when it all came undone
they each said they knew
it was a mistake, that
he shoulda known better

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboycoleridge

And another oldie but goodie.  This started out as a vignette that I sent you.  Then I read a poem today written by Michelangelo and it all came together.  Hope you like……

You Know

You know
What I wish
What I need

What I think

What I want
What I would do
What I would be doin’
What I long for and yearn for and ache for

How it could be
How it should be
Where I would be
Who I would be with

What I hope
What I dream
What I believe
You know

You know
You know that I am here
More near to you than anyone
I know, you know

What means it then that we are sundered so
If these hopes that flow from you are true,
If this sweet expectancy is not fantasy,
Help break down what between us stands
For bein’ without you is not endurable
Because in you I love, because I know

What you know best, be not therefore afraid
Souls need not burn for souls,
Spirits need not cry for spirits
Come, that we may know the splendour
Together we can find what was meant for us,
That which only together we can know

© copyright 2013 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “You Know You Know” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra.  Also check out this song which was based on “You Know You Know”, “One Love” by Massive Attack.  We do not own the rights to these songs.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

Today is the birthday of Anders Zorn (Anders Leonard Zorn; Yvraden, Mora, Dalarna, Sweden 18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920 Stockholm); artist. He obtained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etcher. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.

From 1875 to 1880 Zorn studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, where he amazed his teachers with his talent. Members of Stockholm society approached him with commissions. This was how Zorn met his wife, Emma Lamm, early in 1881. Her background was different from Zorn’s. Coming from a wealthy Jewish merchant family, she was interested in art and culture.

 Gallery

Wallace Stegner

Today is the birthday of Wallce Stegner (Wallace Earle Stegner, Lake Mills, Iowa, February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993 Santa Fe); novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Angle of Repose, The Spectator Bird, Crossing to Safety), short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called “The Dean of Western Writers”. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

Stegner grew up in Great Falls, Montana; Salt Lake City, Utah; and the village of Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner says he “lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada”. He received a B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He also studied at the University of Iowa, where he received a master’s degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935.

In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. For 59 years they shared a “personal literary partnership of singular facility”, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the result of a car accident on March 28, 1993.

Prose

• It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too.It needs them now.
  • This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection’s first essay, “The Marks of Human Passage”, which is by Stegner (page 17).
• It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.
  • “The War Between the Rough Riders and the Bird Watchers” (1959 address; reprinted in Wildlands and Our Civilization, David Brower, editor, 1964, and in Voices for the Wilderness, William Schwarz, editor, 1970, page 76)
• There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.
  • All the Little Live Things (1967)
• If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
  • “It All Began with Conservation” Smithsonian magazine, April 1990, pages 35-43
• The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe.
  • “The Best Idea We Ever Had” Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West, page 137

Wilderness Letter (1960)

A 3 December 1960 letter to David Pesonen, concerning the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission’s report. Reprinted many times, for example, in The Sound of Mountain Water(1969) and Marking the Sparrow’s Fall (1998).

• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.
• Photo by mac tag
• It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

• These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or “usefulness” or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
• She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
• We write to make sense of it all.
• Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

And today is the birthday Jack Gilbert (Pittsburgh; February 18, 1925 – November 13, 2012 Berkeley); poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a “serious romantic.” Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.

Much of Gilbert’s work is about his relationships with women. While in Italy, he met Gianna Gelmetti, a romantic partner who appears frequently in his work. The relationship ended after a year. Gilbert was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg, whom he met when she was nineteen and his student in San Francisco, and with whom he was in a relationship for six years. Of the poet, Gregg once said, “All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”

He was also in a significant long-term relationship with the poet Laura Ulewicz during the late fifties and early sixties in San Francisco. Ulewicz was a great influence on his early work; in fact much of his characteristic style for which he later became known came directly from her, and his first book was dedicated to her. Gilbert also was in a relationship with Michiko Nogami, another former student and a Japanese language instructor 21 years his junior, about whom he wrote many of his poems. Nogami died of cancer at the age of 36, in 1982. When asked why he had not written more poetry, Jack Gilbert said that he was spending his time falling in love with women.

Gilbert said; It’s not a business with me. […] I’m not a professional of poetry; I’m a farmer of poetry.

Verse

We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

***

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

***

Love is not enough.
We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time.
We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed
to reach the body within the body

***

It is a thing in us, mostly unnoticed.
There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss.
In the yearning.
The pain going this way and that. Never again.

A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had.
And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

***

The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.

***

Only things worth writing about: Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

mac tag