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.