The Lovers’ Chronicle 24 February – blue moan – art by Winslow Homer, Franz Skarbina & Witkacy – birth of Rosalía de Castro & Weldon Kees

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

dream sounds…
feeling the wind in his hair he thinks, this must be the High Plains
then he sees that he is standing on a mesa
been awhile since i was here, he thinks, but i can still hear the moan
Rosalía could hear it, Kees could hear it and he got lost in it
there was a time when that was all he heard, all he wanted
but now, he hears something else in the wind
a lovely voice, worth getting lost in
My darling, says the beautiful redhead, are you coming back to bed
absolutely

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no need to follow Kees tonight
“Will go wherever you lead”
that is where the phrase
came from, and it is
“Dark yet evocative”
was a time, everywhere
i turned it was there,
so i started goin’ in deeper
“Glad you found a way out”
still mostly there when we met
“Now for a different kind of moan”

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

long plateaus of emptiness, kinda wordy but woulda been an appropriate topic for a day, could be what this was all about, pre-you, it was a call for understandin’, a plea sometimes, and i think it was important to poke and prod to prove that somethin’ could penetrate the numbness, the blue moan, an important part of the story, but now the vistas are full and the only moan is that of bliss

© copyright 2022.2024 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

fillin’ time
with thoughts

contentment
in dreamin’,
awakenin’
can we feel, can we find
what we are lookin’ for
the promise has no end

nightfall comin’ on,
late February, rainin’

a song, playin’
i see now,
the trail ahead
and the years with you

can you hear
can you see

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

have to write one for Kees today
High Plains guy
yes there is wind in his verse
and loss and desolation
he wrote testimonials
to long plateaus of emptiness
right up until he disappeared
cannot imagine that level of despair
yet these pages contain other stories
of those who could not carry the burden
any further
the blue moan
we gonna keep totin’ ours
on the back of these words

© copyright 2020.2024 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

wander through thoughts yet,
and gaze upon thy memory

where feeds countless notes,
from remembered looks,
worn by the waste of time

listen
at the close of day,
hear the story
whispered
will be the cry
a murmur
against the wail
of the lone night

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

like all the others
ended abruptly

takin’ chances for years
just intensified
the episodes

a blue moan

tried not to fall
but could not manage it

talked of leavin’
another country
gittin’ lost
become a mystery

“What keeps you going?”
do you know…

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

loneliness
to fill the void
with thoughts

happiness,
no too strong,
contentment
in dreamin’,
awakenin’
wretched
must be
livin’ without
soundin’

i shall find you,
i shall find…

can you find
what you do not know
you are lookin’ for
the promise
has no end

nightfall comin’ on,
late February, snow falls
driftin’ in piles, the wind
whippin’
across the plains

a song, playin’
a blue moan
i see now,
mapped and marred,
the trail behind
and the years ahead

hurt, madness, fear
threaten, escape, survive

may this night
open Her comfort
to these tired eyes

i look at you
across time
and darkness
and wonder
can you feel
can you hear

do you know…

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

brave
swingin’ out
over the edge
on hopes tied
to nothin’ but dreams

the risk was it all
comin’ unraveled
and that is what happened
one day found at the bottom
broken and disillusioned

***

one winter evenin’
she hugged me
in her little black dress
after the opera and
my mind raced
in all directions

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Is it just that
I am lonely
Or, really, are
You just that hot!

***

She makes my day
She is funny
She has spirit
She is as sharp
as the crease in
my jeans, & her
eyes; so pretty
Too bad tellin
her matters not

***

Sowed it, dang sure
reapin’ it. Earned
it, deserve it,
own it. Payin’
for it. No end
to it. It is
the way it must
be. Accept it.

***

Superpower?
Why yes I do:
Findin’ women
with more baggage
than the Denver
airport and then
makin’ ’em fall
in love with me.

© copyright 2015 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Winslow Homer

Today is the birthday of Winslow Homer (Boston; February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910 Prouts Neck, Maine); landscape painter and printmaker, perhaps best known for his marine subjects.  In my opinion, he is one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator.  He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium.  He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, Homer became reclusive in the late 1870s, no longer enjoying urban social life and living instead in Gloucester.  For a while, he even lived in secluded Eastern Point Lighthouse (with the keeper’s family).  In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather.  After 1880, he rarely featured genteel women at leisure, focusing instead on working women.

Homer died at the age of 74 and was interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His painting, Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, remains unfinished.

Gallery 

Rosalía de Castro

Today is the birthday of Rosalía de Castro (María Rosalía Rita de Castro; Santiago de Compstela, Galicia, Spain; 24 February 1837 – 15 July 1885 Padrón, Galicia); romanticist writer and poet.

Writing in the Galician language, after the Séculos Escuros (lit. Dark Centuries), she became an important figure of the Galician romantic movement, known today as the Rexurdimento (“renaissance”), along with Manuel Curros Enríquez and Eduardo Pondal.  Her poetry is marked by saudade, an almost ineffable combination of nostalgia, longing and melancholy.

She married Manuel Murguía, member of the Galician Academy, historian, journalist and editor of Rosalía’s books.

The date she published her first collection of poetry in Galician, Cantares gallegos (gl) (“Galician Songs”), 17 May 1863, is commemorated every year as the Día das Letras Galegas (“Galician Literature Day”), an official holiday of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, and has been dedicated to an important writer in the Galician language since 1963.

Relative poverty and sadness marked her life, although she had a sense of commitment to the poor and to the defenseless.  She was an opponent of abuse of authority and defender of women’s rights.  She suffered from uterine cancer and died of this illness.

She is buried in the Panteón de Galegos Ilustres, a pantheon (mausoleum) in the Convent of San Domingos de Bonaval at Santiago.

Verse 

¿Qué es soledad?
Para llenar el mundo
basta a veces
un solo pensamiento.

Es feliz el que soñando, muere.
Desgraciado el que muera sin sonar.

Yo te hallaré y me hallarás.
No, no puede acabar lo que es eterno,
ni puede tener fin la inmensidad

Today is the birthday of Franz Skarbina (Berlin 24 February 1849 – 18 May 1910 Berlin); impressionist painter, draftsman, etcher and illustrator.

In 1888, he was appointed a professor at the Prussian Academy and, in 1892, became a full member there. A year later, however, he resigned his teaching position due to disagreements with the academy’s Director, Anton von Werner. The problem stemmed from his participation in the “Group of Eleven”, an association of artists dedicated to promoting their own exhibitions of what was then considered “radical” art, free of the academy’s influence. This eventually (in 1898) led to the establishment of the Berlin Secession, of which Skarbina was a co-founder.

He died at his home from an acute kidney ailment, and is buried in the Old Cemetery of St. Jacobkirche. All of the items in his estate were destroyed during World War II.

Gallery

Weldon Kees

And today is the birthday of Weldon Kees (Harry Weldon Kees; Beatrice, Nebraska; February 24, 1914 – July 18, 1955 San Francisco); poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, short story writer, and filmmaker.  In my opinion, he is an important mid-twentieth-century poet of the same generation as John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell.  His work has been influential on subsequent generations of poets writing in English and other languages and his collected poems have been included in many anthologies.

 In 1937, he married Ann Swan.

8XX, oil on canvas, Weldon Kees, 1949

In 1948, Weldon and Ann began summering at the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.  In the autumn of that year, Kees had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery and one of his paintings was included in a group show of established and rising artists at the Whitney Museum.  Despite these initial successes, however, Kees’s work only had modest sales.

Kees and Ann drove cross-country to San Francisco in late 1950.

From 1951 to 1954, Kees also made many new contacts as well as renewed old ones in the San Francisco Renaissance, among them Kenneth Rexroth and the founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Kees’s poetry, however, did not embrace the kind dionysiac character and became increasingly sardonic and confessional in poems such as “1926.”

Restless and often estranged from his poetry, Kees began to collaborate with the jazz clarinetist Bob Helm in 1953 on ballads and torch songs (some written for the singer Ketty Lester).

In 1954, Kees separated from Ann, whose alcoholism led to a psychotic episode triggered by watching the Army–McCarthy hearings on television.  After having her institutionalized, Kees divorced her around the time that his last book appeared, Poems, 1947–1954 (San Francisco, Adrian Wilson, 1954).  He then focused on organizing a musical revue, Pick Up the Pieces, which eventually became a much more elaborate venue of literary burlesque, titled Poets Follies, which premiered in January 1955 and featured a stripper reading the poetry of Sara Teasdale.

In July 1955, Kees spent time with a woman he had met while working at Langley Porter, a Jungian psychiatrist named Virginia Patterson.  Like other relationships Kees had following his divorce, this ended abruptly.  Kees, too, had been taking barbiturates for the past two years, which also had intensified his episodes of manic depression.  He confessed to trying to jump over the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge, but he could not physically manage it.  He talked of going to Mexico as an alternative, a country that fascinated him, in books such as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.  Kees returned to his home in the Marina District on the evening of July 17, 1955.  What he did the following day is a mystery.  He telephoned a friend, the memoirist Janet Richards, asking her, “What keeps you going?”  On July 19, 1955, Kees’s car was found deserted on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge.  He was never found.

Verse

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

from “1926”

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes

I look at you
Across those fires and the dark

A good night for the fireplace to be
crackling with flames – or so he figured,
Crumpling the papers he could only see
As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness.

• The Heat in the Room

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

mac tag