La Stala in Tunuyán

The viento zonda approached
from over the empty minder
mountains gazing at the farmer
below looking into the pen
where seven squeling piglets seemed
happy or sad or anguished.
The weight the buyer mentioned
floats a moment above each pig´s head,
then the sharp call of big fat reality
hanging the chosen unwilling feetwise
and fed to the suck of the measurement sack.

What tables need mention for martyrdom
so knives crave for the smile they afford
somewhere above every satisfied belly.
Oh, but the taste! What death isn´t necessary?
But, don´t worry, there´s nothing all that funny
about that terrible (sudden or slow) fading
that may be as subtle as this insect´s struggle
with the bleeding tip of my ball point pen.
It´s wing stuck in the thick of the ink, I examine:
there the confused contortion of the figure
and the shape of what wills my harm - a bite.
I watch the thing recuperate again into order.
Calm, it flies into what seems Mendoza´s dry blast
but for the glass, isn´t. Again my blood radiates
into the heaving becoming lull that it can´t resist.
My mammellian crown and its repititious task.

There is a brain ticking behind
each chanco´s brow that smiles
in the quiet between the human and the sow.

There is no fast thing about
as the vacas dull in the sun.
´Pasto´is all hollow tubes,
some make it through to the dung.

Silence is the dim waiting
deep within the fluffy core
where all Easter´s children
wait for the bunnies they so adore.

Dumb-struck and idiotic
the gallinas call and call and call,
sound leading to nothing real
but an empty hall of bouncing balls.

The animals on the farm are all busy like this,
playing out the plot my tepid mind gives.
The mooing clings to the laughs
and the grunts to Papa Fear´s grin.

But all that awful could be world
wasn´t - there was the Family Agostini:
Jorge-Luis, Mo-Mo Mauricio, the struggling
but always happy;


the Laura who from
an email became
a reason to trust;

Antonella whiling away
like Alice in some kingdom;

Sofia the amused
watching unfold
what she doesn´t want,
but loves the same
quiet way
her brother Nico does.

This was all on a farm in Tunuyán
where I saw a life worth living.
I suspect it will always carry on
in me in ways I can´t predict
like the melodies that steal
from one into another
of our favorite songs:
time changing anew
what memory needs
to stay the same.

--------------------------

Here are some more pictures :

This is the Agostini forty year old Jeep (Estacionero) that runs on pressurized gas (not liquid). It worked and you could hear it working miles away, too!

This Sofi with Dulce, who is an Argentina breed. The dog loved to cry. There was some story I didn´t completely understand where she got runover by the above Jeep (on accident) and began to cry for the pain. However, or so suggests Luis, the attention she won from this convinced her that crying was a good thing to do.



This the Agostini house. Luis is a master builder, in every sense of the title, and built this house buy himself. And it´s the third he´s built for them!

This is the cow whose name was something like Esperanza, but I never called her that because I called her ´Mala´, which means ´the naughty one´. Why? Because on two occasions she prodded me with her horns and I had huge bruises on my leg and my ribs! And I only was trying to feed her! The reason she was probably ´pissy´, as I kept happily saying, was because she was pregnant. And lo and behold, the calf was born the day before I left! I even got to name it - Momo. Why? A French guy that was there when I first arrived kept calling Mauricio this name. This had other connotations for me, namely that it came from an inside joke that started with Joe Pesci in Casino clubbing a guy in a bar and then calling him a ´f****** momo´.

It was also Mauricio´s birthday, so all these kids were there.

Here´s Antonella, this neighbor I kept calling Rodriguez whose father could talk for the heavens and was stocked with lots of licquor, namely this stuff called fernet that they claimed was the most genuine Italian stuff you can get. They mixed it with Pepsi. Tasted like medicine.

This is me with Luis and Laura´s mother. He had a joke that he told by telling me that word for ´suegra´, which is mother-in-law, in German is ´aaaahkkk´ or something and I believed him until he pointed out the humor in front of the lady.

And here´s more random ones: