The thing is I am not

like a wood pigeon

with a white collar

and gray head that looks to be green,

a tail that wants to be a pheasant

loping from branch to scarred branch.

 

We looked from the road

the kid who became my grandmother

took from church a century ago,

a few kilometers of her eye-level

being on the top of stone walls

and the mountains to the southwest,

Galway, Mayo, out past Cong,

mountain and sea-bucked places.

 

The old place we saw decades ago

had gotten overgrown, with a family

running a terrier kennel

in the habitable half now.

It was noisy. There was a baby in back.

 

The mountains are green folds

of a sofa, whose television viewing

is the sea, wildly carved by it.

The living room is the whole scenario.

 

All day here

looking for cairns

in featureless field

rectangled with stone

after featureless field,

each a different width

or length, from above

not a pattern

but improvisation,

 

it was that crazy feeling

of abstraction,

irritation, sunbaked.

 

I was ready to go all day.