|
Crazy Golf
That balmy summer holiday
By the seaside when I was nine
And woke but wasn't really awake
Crying from deep
In a dream
'I can't get it in the hole'
Not knowing the words
Until they
came out
Only the desperate bursting
Of shame.
We'd been playing crazy golf
Hitting balls up slopes,
Round barriers, down chutes
In fantasy castles,
Anything to make torturous
The few crooked yards
To triangular metal flags
1 to 18.
And now 'in the middle of my life'
Still half awake
Striking balls with fear
And optimism
Down a crazy course
Designed, it seems,
Purely to test and amuse,
And others drop in the holes
With a gurgling clunk, but then
Mine goes in
With a victory roll
And a satisfying thud
And I raise my hand aloft
Feeling, appropriately enough,
Whole.
Small victories
Gleefully marked
By thin pencil stubs,
The score tallied up
At the end of the round,
The final reckoning made.
Strange that I can still hear
My plaintive voice meeting
My parent's worried faces looming
Out of the mists of consciousness,
And now my older self has a vision
Of all the events since then
Sliding into a hole which seems
To stretch wider, sliding like
Rubbish down a chute, whirling like
A winding trail of glittering stars
Forever falling - as now I roll
This ball, this ball towards
Its goal, will it fall - it teeters
On the lip - will it fall?
|
