Rancheras & Tequila

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Mexican Ranchera, poetry for fun

I have loved Mexican rancheras since the age of three when my parents and I moved to the Gulf coast of Mexico. I heard rancheras on the radio and danced to them with our maid and her hot, 12-year-old son, Miguel. I saw musicians singing rancheras live on the street and at fiestas. Whether I could distinguish Javier Solís from Vicente Fernández I cannot say, but I did have a preference for the super campy, drunken wailing versions. They just seemed so funny to me (and were probably sung by José Alfredo Jiménez).

Decades later, pregnant, I listened obsessively to Cuco Sanchez, the only ranchera album my family still owned. To this day, my Canadian-born son feels an almost patriotic passion for Mexican Spanish.

Recently, a friend delivered a wonderful presentation on the Mexican corrido, a close musical relative of ranchera. She introduced us to their poetry and meter, tracing their origins to Spain and the story-telling traditions of the troubadour. Spun, not surprisingly, to my own early days, I spent the following weekend binge-listening to rancheras on YouTube. “Rancheras and Tequila” is my humble tribute, with gratitude for the memories.

~~~

Rancheras and tequila I’m enjoying
with an old friend who’s in town just passing through.
I am texting this from Rosalí’s Cantina
just to tell you we’re not talking about you.

The moon is full, fish tacos are sabroso;
our friend still has that lust heat in his eye.
From my cheek he wipes a love smear of chipotle
while the great José Jimenez makes us cry.

Ai, ai, ai, aiii, we could have been the toast of Guanajuato,
your killer looks, my brains the perfect pair.
With lonely hearts an ever-growing market,
we dreamed a way to heal the great despair.

We talk, my friend and I, until the moon sets
and our bottle of Don Julio has run dry.
We chase each other laughing to the seashore,
throw our clothes off, to life’s problems sing goodbye.

We’re kissing while our legs float out behind us,
when suddenly he shouts, “Un tiburón!”
I cannot see a fin through all my splashing,
nor the glint of antique silver from his gun—

Ai, ai, ai, aiii, we could have been the toast of Guanajuato,
your killer looks, my brains the perfect pair.
With lonely hearts an ever-growing market,
we dreamed a way to heal the great despair.

These days I hang in Rosalí’s Cantina
and imagine us together, you and I.
Most patrons cannot hear my sad rancheras,
believing the tequila makes them cry.

The shark, he doesn’t visit like he used to.
He’s famous now—what need has he of me?
But one day while he’s cheating some pareja
of their fortunes, he will hear a sultry voice,
“Oh look, a honey bee!”

Ai, ai, ai, aiii, we could have been the toast of Guanajuato,
your killer looks, my brains the perfect pair.
With lonely hearts an ever-growing market,
we dreamed a way to heal the great despair.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Carnaval de la Vie

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Honore de Balzac, medieval French fixed verse, sestina

As you behold the carousel of players
in this glorious carnival called life,
take heed, approve, withhold your faith
in how and why they rise and fall
around you might consider, for a lark,
the forces light and dark, centripetal

and centrifugal, yes? For every petal
that descends without some player’s
tutting interference, there’s a lark
eager to jubilate, sing sweet of life
with all her many seasons. Fall
into razored traps of loss of faith,

you slit your wings. A jailer’s faith
in his assignment to destroy hope’s tender petal
ere it bursts forth from the bud will fall
like iron bars around him. As players
we are born, purveyors of a singular life
created thought by thought, a vulture or a lark.

Deplored by toilers and long-sufferers, the lark
receives through song and flit the faith
of mighty gods and thereby thrives at life.
Her passing flight uplifts the petal
of the hyacinth and rose. We players
are the axis of each season’s spring and fall.

Lamentives and depressors, I watch you fall,
entangled deep within your nets devoid of lark,
your favourite recitation, “Woe!” Jolly players
once, by circumstance & choice, you’ve dug of faith
a quicksand pit, too dense for seed and petal
to emerge until death frees you to some future life.

Circling each other is the stuff of life,
both unicorn and sabre tooth survived their fall;
the pot pourri, now bagged, recalls her petal
days, and as we humans sigh, the mother lark
sings to her eggs. We need not claim a faith,
for we are made of it, sublime and sacred players.

O, carnival of life and ash, may lark
and lyre’s melodies fall true around my faith,
the force centripetal, that draws to me eternal players.

~~~

It’s been a while since I posted a sestina. This one was doubly inspired by my current reading of Honoré de Balzac (the French title, in homage to him) and the opportunity to sit across from a father and his two young children in a coffee shop this morning. The father’s predominant words to his gorgeous kids were “No, no, no…” and “Don’t!” The children, like Balzac, stayed true to their axis of merriment, mighty forces both.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Hasta Luego, Cofokabe!

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, poetry, sonnet, terza rima

I’m letting the Cofokabe River
run dry, pulling up stakes from one-horse
villages with nothing to deliver.

The waterways, they flourished once, their course
ran sweet as apricots and salsa hot.
We gathered, felt uplifted, never forced.

Your songs reshaped my politics, your thought
on Russian Lit unearthed simplicity
I feared I’d lost. We gave, we learned, we got.

But rivers bend and yearn to reach the sea.
Lid bangers, chronic grievers, sere the banks;
entangled, hopeless, you don’t interest me.

And so, dear Cofokabe, evaporate!
When springtime reigns, we may yet celebrate.

~~~

This sonnet was written in terza rima with an anagram thrown in, so as not to be too obvious.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

What do You Wish?

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, ringelrime, rondeau

~~a ringelrime~~

What do you wish to persuade me of
with your shaking fist and your tattered glove?
If, in the choice we all have to be happy or right,
I choose ease, turn away from the fright
of the critical masses who disbelieve love,

seeing things as they are, never looking above
or through, like a snivel-nosed bully will shove
me into the nearest fight. What do you wish

in your hope to be wrong? Will you prove
by your twitching that a scavenger outwits the dove
who’s indifferent to death? Are you scared of night
or the coming dawn? Confusion is blind to the bright
and ecstatic arrival of love. What do you wish?

~~~

Ringelrime is the German term for a wrap-around rondeau, in which the introductory half-line “rounds off” the poem in subsequent stanzas.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016