(along The Caminho Da Fé, Minas Gerais, Brazil. July 2008)
after Petrarch’s Sonnet 35

Lone and pensive I pedaled bare, cold
sertão (in slowed doubt) geared to ditch
highway’s jetsam or social kitsch –
the damn “whatcha-up-tos” untold;

for through this exhaustion they’d read
my face, seen me cinder within
such that I’m made plain—and even
the woods, that creek, its riverbed,

those peaks all know this affliction
of besotted mind as one would
a lover—though she doesn’t. Yet

I can’t find paths so seldom-rode
or steep where her apparition
won’t join in, and we two gals chat.