Time Has a Centipede’s Fear of Clocks

                                                                         — César Vallejo

Lystrophis semicinctus, ringed hognose snake, falsa coral

Time is a snake 

run over streetside

drilled, scaled 

by beetles & flies.

The corpse coral red

inside black inside

cream, head to tail

a loop of road schooling

spasmed to mime

a Paleolithic blade.

I carry the kill

to gravel’s shoulder

lease more snake time

for carrion hawks

to raise snake bits 

aloft at noon’s breeze.

With time I string

snake ribs & spine 

to wear as a totem

of petro-vehicle mind.

Fondo los Ruiles, Pencahue, Chile

Mike & I spent much of February 18th-19th at Fondo los Ruiles, an 1,100 acre farm recently purchased by Simon Black of Sovereign Man.

entry to Simon's farm

The property is a working farm that produces & markets crops of blueberry, plum, tomato, & wine grapes. Simon plans to sell lots — 36 in total, that includes one for him — & hoping to create an amicable community of freedom-loving people.

Mike walks up the road next to the plum orchard

The land reminds me of Napa Valley — brown soil on rolling hills, in some places quite steep, covered with oaks, scrub, & long grass that yellows in summer & greens in the winter rains. The previous owner took advantage of a Chilean government pine tree giveaway by planting plenty. The pines add shade & offer privacy between lots.

an irrigation canal

The farm has plenty of water & is on the electric grid, three hours from Santiago, & fifteen minutes from Talca — a city of 200,000 with car dealers, multiple supermarkets, a gorgeous river. The weather was cloudy & pleasantly warm until late morning on Sunday when the sun burst through & sunburned quite a few of us. We & many others hiked as much of the farm as we could manage. My legs are finally recovering from the unaccustomed ups & downs.

one of the large views, possibly from lot 16

Master planner Kimberly sited lots so that nearly all have views, many of them spectacular to ridges & land below. She classifies them as forest, orchard, & view lots. All are at least 5,000 square meters, which maintains their agriculture zoning (for low property taxes). A residence (or two) can utilize up to 15% of the lot area.

splendid rock

Simon put together a first class weekend of interesting people, talks, tours, snacks, & meals during which I & many others naturally ate & drank to excess. I sense that I've gained back the weight I lost during my gastrointestinal miseries last fall. Eating food — plant & animal — produced on the farm was a special treat. Saturday afternoon a saunter through the mixed-fruit orchard & farm garden left me sugar-sticky on my face & arms up to the elbows with pear, peach, nectarine, fig, almond, persimmon, blueberry, cantaloupe, & whatever I've forgotten. Sunday lunch was farm food — chicken, lamb, salad, squash, fruit, wine, watermelon.

Santiago

Above & beyond Simon's farm, we loved Talca & Santiago, clean accessible cities where items you look for — organic peanut butter, quality tea, brand-name socks — are for sale no matter where they were manufactured. Oh to live without Argentine import regulations. Talca also has gyms, playgrounds, good hotels, excellent restaurants. During our six days in Chile we ate seafood & more seafood, including sushi, shrimp, octopus, eel, corvina, salmon. Let's not forget the Pisco Sours — I ordered one every chance I got.

I saw a very large rabbit sprint through the pines

I suppose Simon's project is not for the faint of heart. The roads aren't all in. The lots aren't platted. Purchasing details are TBA. But we're in, we hope to buy a lot, we've already met with architects about the house we'd put up — custom pre-fab, ultra-modern, metallic red . . .

looking back at the walkable-only road to the 30-number lots

System Failure

    That’s it for the pump, for which — sunshine
hours — the solar panels made lots of power.
Now there is no fountain unleashing the force,
no water play, pond more stagnant than fresh.

    That’s it for concentrics of splash:
light alchemized to aeration & turbulence,
tickled by sun’s energy tadpoles
amusing us by no more than wriggling.

    That’s it for planning ahead: the eco meme,
sizing of gallons per minute, the system
ready to go for over six months.

    That’s it for the well-tempered pond, for
the burning smell of the circuit board,
for failure in under thirty days.

Water

Cafayateños say so much rain is unusual. Nearly every day dark clouds build behind the mountains to the southwest, spill across the sky. Lightning streaks, thunder booms. It’s a fluke or it’s global warming, but no one here mentions climate change. Instead, people wonder how the grapes will do with this much rain, they go down to the river to stand & sprawl — children doggy-paddle — in tumbling brown water.

water enters like an unexpected guest
                                                    we welcome
               with curses, sponges, rags

water as a pool on the windowsill
               spots & a puddle on the floor
       showers spill from the tops of the window frames
plaster crumples on walls

floods in the thyme
            the cactus garden
             the orange grove

after hard rain the desert greens
                                             teru-terus skip like randy children

early morning after hard rain
the earth breathes
                         the air is softer

hard rain collapses the sand pits of antlions

Our garden guzzles every drop. Plants unloaded from a truck in mid-October grow bigger every day, except for daylilies, whose leaves the ants prune & haul away no matter that we spray. Dozens of tuna (prickly pear) — a monster crop — fall to the ground daily  & lure more ants. We shovel tuna into the compost or kick them into the acequia. Yes, we could eat them, but the few I gathered filled my gloved hands with dozens of tiny yellow spines that called for a soaking in Epsom salts, the purchase of tweezers, a loupe to pull. My cloth gloves required two runs through the washing machine & Mike’s meticulous de-spining before I could wear them again.

sand, organics, ripe tuna
                                 gather in the pool
         I angle rocks for circulation
sand drifts
              tuna whirl

green grass grows in the acequia
         blades long & horizontal
                                           like mermaid hair
streaming in running water

Andean snowmelt warm as blood in noon heat

next to the acequia pool a garden floods
due to a break in the concrete
                                         that once made stones a wall
are grass roots rotting?

maybe I could learn proportion
                                          water to gravel to sand
mix up a bucket of hormigón

Late today in the large pond we spot a slick of bubbly — toad eggs, transparent, each carrying a black speck — surrounded by thousands of wrigglers. Tadpoles eating toad eggs. Will birds arrive to eat the tadpoles? Which birds?

long red legs of a teru-teru next to the water
        red feet wade
                            belly floats

wings lift to splash, to fly, white & black chevrons beating

touch-&-go, touch-&-go
                                wasps skim the pond
               red, black, gold
dip too low
               the weight of water swamps one

the damselfly’s wings are transparent where they are not electric blue

After dark the rain falls constant & soft. Plants grow visibly in this summer of extra rain. The palan-palan makes a forest. Carolina bristlemallow swells from tiny stragglers to a dense green mat. Every day another pineapple sage plant raises red fingers. The Portulaca gilliessii flowers — orange, red, pink, yellow — shine like jewels. What all blooms? Pineapple sage, portulaca, basil, thyme, oregano, curry plant, mint, daylilies, palan-palan, broom, anise, begonia, bristlemallow, cactus, rose. No masses of color, only bright spots here & there.

in town the donkeys sleep at night
                                               at river’s edge
                          on sand & stones

the river normally dry or nearly
bicycles & walkers traverse the arched metal bridge

cars must ford the riverbed
                                     wet or dry
                                                   except in floods

Mike says,
              “I just washed my car”
Yakeen says,
                  “Go slowly, go very slowly.”

Another Weeding Marathon

Another weeding marathon underway

I sift the soil for dark brown roots

no thicker than IV sharps

topside budding 

curled translucent fingers extinguishing 

gravity for light to manufacture 

chlorophyll leaf by branching vine

to climb & twine & strangle

prickly pear heedless of spines

not that vines stop cactus 

or portulaca or creeper grass

because desert denizens bear with en-

tanglements though our plants

coreopsis & pineapple sage 

& daylilies might not.

Portulaca oleracea, purslane, verdolaga

Rainy Times

This morning the clouds are low, the sky leaks damp, terú-terús,
doves, & dragonflies seek the freshly weeded patches, taste the earth.

The morning’s bright heat ebbs to solid white in the east,
moving black in the west, & a dust-devil wind
that rises to rattle the doors.

By mid-morning we’d weeded the Internet up & running, by mid-afternoon
we’d weeded up a thunderstorm that dampened the turned earth.

Afternoons the winds blow, sometimes fiercely, & outdoors in bright sun
or mottled by clouds moving east, the veranda rockers idly rock.

Blackened cloud, knock-down breeze, thunder’s metal, lightning’s tease,
drop scatter across the big window: outcome’s no more than a flutter.

Rumbled by thunder, menaced by gray, drenched now by wind-blown rain,
the crew unrolls the heavy black plastic to turn a hole into a pond.

After brief strong rain & a full house, suddenly we find ourselves alone
with open doors admitting the mild sweet air, the benteveo’s song.

I hadn’t seen a swallow for days before the dark clouds in the southeast,
the heavy rain, the window leaks, the end-to-end double rainbow.

Sunday Random

Movement alerts us to a hare springing from giant brindled haunches,

pausing to graze on alfalfa & weedy greens, dissolving in long grass.

A white monjita lands on a prickly pear, another on a wooden stake

rigged to an olive tree: sites with fragrance of ripening fruit & views.

We cycle through swarms of tiny black insects: every immersion

flecks our shirtfronts, arms, & thighs, catches Mike’s watering eyes.

Yesterday large ants gnawed the gardenias until Mike sprayed poison

fatal to the ants’ algae farms: today the foiled workers are gone.

One tree per day, I say, my promise to pull the giant weeds surrounding

each staked trunk, crowding the watering holes: Mike & I weed two.

I fill two banged-up construction wheelbarrows with large & small rocks 

I’ve dug while weeding, rocks to border our future vegetable plots.

Despite our plan for a rest day, we’ve biked, weeded, tested outlets,

repaired curtain rods, watered, hauled rocks: As always, we’re tired.

Besides, we’ve talked to each other more than usual: it’s what happens 

when the Internet’s down: we’re forced to spend time in the real world.

Lepus europaeus, European hare, liebre común

Xolmis iripero, white monjita, monjita blanca

these wheelbarrows proved too heavy to move

Argentine Gopher

I need a mesh to sift my yellow stones from tucu-tucu’s mound

of grubbed-up sand. So sharp, its ever sprouting teeth, its shoveling toes. 

What’s the world record for distance dug? Miles mounded? Have tucu-tucus

caverns between their tunnels? Birthing places? Garbage dumps?

I love nature, but what if tucu-tucus drill through our house’s walls? 

Tomorrow I might wake up to concrete rubble beside our bed.

Mike, who rips off grasshopper heads & gouges wood-boring beetles

from overhead beams, is threatening mayhem – shotgun or pitchfork.

Decades ago I woke at dawn to noise on the roof outside a room in my  

brother's home. Naked & gunning for gopher, he aimed a twenty-two.

Tucu-tucu, I’m warning you, keep to the open sand beyond our lot.

You’re better light through my camera lens than dead meat on Mike’s tines.

Ctenomys argentinus, tucu-tucu

Montevideo -> Buenos Aires on New Year's day

On New Year's day we checked out of Montevideo's Austral Hotel (highly recommend, soft pillows, Internet in room) & taxied to Tres Cruces, the Montevideo bus station qua mall, which two days earlier had been a hive of travelers & shoppers, on this day though, deserted, the shops closed. We were relieved to find a staffer at the counter of Colonia Express, with whom we had tickets for the bus & ferry ride back to Buenos Aires.

display in Montevideo bus station

No problem. We checked in, checked our email (free slow wireless @ Tres Cruces), then hiked a few blocks with our heavy rollers & backpacks to one of the few restaurants open on New Year's morning. Unfortunately, they had not much more than mediocre empanadas. Back at the bus station, we checked our bags for Buenos Aires & climbed to the upper story of a large bus for a two-hour ride to the city of Colonia, which is west & a little bit north of Montevideo. Not much to see during the ride. Rolling green hills. No traffic.

Colonia ferry waiting area

Colonia is said to be a beautiful old city, but the bus passed through none of that on its way to the port. The ferry was due to depart in an hour. We watched it arrive in plenty of time, a much smaller boat than we expected, but, no surprise in Latin America, we all stood in line for nearly an hour waiting for an official to allow us to board. No explanations, just waiting.

entering the port of Buenos Aires

The ride was brief & eventless. A small ferry on a brown river. A can of Quilmes beer. Then lots of boats in port at Buenos Aires, including a huge casino boat. We disembarked, collected our luggage, & walked out with a large crowd of people all looking for taxis. Not a single taxi. Most folks queued up. We headed out to the avenues & flagged a taxi within five or ten minutes for the ride to our Palermo Soho hotel (will remain nameless, a hotel to forget). Also a quiet city on this holiday. Fortunately, we later found a local neighborhood parilla where we ate good steak & salad for cheap.

The most difficult thing about walking in an Argentine city is dog shit. It's every few feet on every sidewalk. You watch your step. You try not to notice the stench. In spite of the fine weather, we ate dinner inside the restaurant.

freshly weeded patches

This morning the clouds are low, the sky leaks damp, terú-terús,
doves, & dragonflies kiss the freshly weeded patches, taste the earth.