Enjoying Argentina

This warm spring Argentina

morning I’m digging out stones,

pegging clean clothes to dry,

bicycling to town to say hello 

to Alejandro. He shows me our bed,

a palisade of wooden slats 

aslant against a fence at the end 

of his indoor-outdoor 

workshop. He tells me about 

the dictators, about Alfonsín & Menem, 

about years when fear, finance, 

& crime at the highest level produced 

generations without training, 

without apprenticeship to learn 

basic skills long known 

in Argentina: how to paint,

how to build a house, how

to plumb, how to work wood.

This is why the completion of our bed 

is late, this & the misfortune 

that the tree trunk Alejandro

chose did not mill into good planks, 

so he lost time finding another.

I am not here to complain

that the bed is late, I am here 

to visit Alejandro, to smell 

the wood, to admire the squares 

soon to become our mesas de luz 

(bedside tables), to listen

to Alejandro’s stories about

Argentina, to learn two

new words, oficio (craft)

& hundir (to sink), what our shower 

floor must do, because the craft 

of slanting shower tile to the drain

seems to be one of those lost 

skills, the cost of hard years 

in my new country of Argentina.