They'd been walking; it was something to do
at sixteen when evening skimmed
across the Minnesota prairie
to their little college town. A cottony wind
swept the humid hours away
with the late-waning sun.
She called after dinner. He left home
and turned toward hers, walked past
flickering television-lit windows, laugh tracks
blending with cricket calls, until he saw her
under an ochre cone of lamp light
on a sidewalk halfway in between.
They talked low and wandered
along the edge of the golf course,
took each other's hand and ventured
step by step into darkness.
Across temporarily abandoned lawns,
up to a little rise on the 16th tee
where they sat and watched
shadowy shapes of trees on sable grasses
overlap in a collage of construction paper scenery,
scissor-fringed pine branches
waving in the pitch, star-flecked
glitter on the page and moon-glow
pooling like glue in the sand traps.
They fell asleep there, together
on the grass. They did not dream
of the future, of the damage and joy
that would be drawn and torn
in the space of another decade or two.
They woke to daylight
and a whole world
cut from fresh sheets
of yellow, blue and green.
View of the Fairway was originally published in the pages of Midwestern Gothic, issue 17 (spring 2015).
Top photo (cc) Terry McCombs on flickr.
