A Dent

In memory of Michael Allen The height of one stall at odds with the next in your grandfather's byre where cattle allowed themselves to speak only at Yule gave but little sense of why you taught us to admire the capacity of a three-legged stool to take pretty much everything in its stride, even the card-carrying Crow who let out a war-whoop now your red pencil was poised above my calf-hide manuscript like a graip above a groop. The depth of a dent in the flank of your grandfather's cow from his having leaned his brow against it morning and night for twenty years of milking by hand gave but little sense of how distant is the land on which you had us set our sights.