Cowgirl Sonata
Um
galo sozinho não tece uma manhã
One
rooster cannot weave a morning
- João Cabral de Melo Neto
Thinking of maps, blindness, the good life,
I hike the Tennessee Valley Trail to the
Pacific. Poppies
and lupine burst after the rains. Blue green
pebbles
in my pocket. A circling hawk.
Boots slipping on gravel.
You left me in Inverness. Eucalyptus scents
the air.
Blackbirds peck overhead.
Past a sharp turn, a bobcat sits and stares.
A note on the kitchen table under an avocado,
the night after shucked oysters on the porch,
chardonnay, tango, her swirling skirt and sharp heels
clicking staccato on the old barn floor.
Inverness. You are gone.
I see the hole in the stone cliff — God’s eye.
On either side sky, blue, clear and open.
The People’s Revolution
3:30 is an awful time to teach.
Lunch digested and the sugar high depleted.
The sun trickles through the window
of Indian summer in Shepherd Hall.
The boys prop metal stools to keep
the heavy windows open. The trees
cast shadows and light on desks.
Everyone wants to say something irrelevant to
Balzac’s
Girl with the Golden Eyes. Diego flirts with Alyssa.
How to discuss the trajectory of De Marsay and
Paquita’s love?
There is a moment we all break down.
Faisus announces that de Marsay
is a woman when he wears’ Paquita’s dress.
Oscar claims he too would wear
the dress of the woman of his dreams.
We are trying to make sense of the
decadence
and whims of Parisian aristocracy,
their waste of beauty, intelligence and wealth.
Satee is writing about the squalor of the
proletariat.
Nada is in shock that they do not revolt.
Firoza’s wonders if the bourgeoisie
are shackled by “gold and desire.”
Balzac has entered City College, Harlem, 2006.
Nearly a quarter to five, and books are
gathered,
backpacks lifted from the floor.
My students are struggling to write. Grammar
and punctuation are elusive. Verb tenses confuse
them, yet their original syntax engage the ideas
of
nineteenth century Paris, turn the subject
into a poet’s musings.
They show up for class, each other
and their college education.
Class is done. Some play soccer
on the front lawn. Others leave for jobs
after school. The trains trickle away
from 137th Street. Paris is on their minds.
It enters their dreams.
I wonder, who among them, will lead
the people’s revolution.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is a poet and filmmaker. She is the author of Nortada, The North Wind (Global City Press 2005). Her second book of poems, “The First Map of the New World” is forthcoming from Curbstone Press. In 2008 she received a PSC Cuny Research Grant to travel to Kerala, India. Her poems and essays have been published in The Women’s Review of Books, http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org and The North American Review and she was recently included in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, Norton & Co., 2008. She has produced several award-winning films including Landscapes of Memory / O Sertao das Memorias, a Brazilian feature which won Best Latin American Film at Sundance and the Wolfgang Staudte Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998. She is a Lecturer in English at The City College of New York in Harlem and the poetry editor of Global City Review.