Morning with Irish Cows

These (though three-leafed) remind me of the patch of four-leaf clovers I found in our lawn in Santa Fe, the strip along the driveway.  My own unlooked-for patch of good luck, that seemed then inexhaustible.

Now, luck comes other ways.  In poetry, in patient and dumbfounded cows, in the regard of the world back at us.  In the lamb stew or colcannon I will make for supper, this day of the Irish (only three-eighths my day, then).

Afternoon with Irish Cows

There were a few dozen who occupied the field


across the road from where we lived,


stepping all day from tuft to tuft,


their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty


as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

Then later, I would open the blue front door,


and again the field would be full of their munching


or they would be lying down


on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.


How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded


they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

But every once in a while, one of them


would let out a sound so phenomenal


that I would put down the paper


or the knife I was cutting an apple with


and walk across the road to the stone wall


to see which one of them was being torched


or pierced through the side with a long spear.

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see


the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,


her neck outstretched, her bellowing head


laboring upward as she gave voice


to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly


and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

Then I knew that she was only announcing


the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,


pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind


to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,


while she regarded my head and shoulders


above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

—Billy Collins

image:  shamrocks