Ruminations on Golf

I find golf ball after golf ball,

only the best brands,

on the beach called Whiskey Run,

named after a botched bootlegging operation.

Balls shanked or duck hooked

from the luxury links course on the cliffs above,

$350 a round,

Republicans with JD Vance beards

flying in from all over the country.

I stash their mishits in my pockets

for later use at my podunk proletarian course,

a 12-hole (!) layout,

$22 a round,

coyotes and the caretaker’s chickens

roaming fairways of weeds and molehills,

sand traps unraked for decades,

greens less forgiving than most inferior human beings,

playing with expensive clubs from my dead uncle,

the theologian who beat the shit out of his oldest son growing up

and gave up on God at the end.

Sometimes I pull out the Billy Casper Shotmaker driver,

crafted from persimmon,

rip a tee shot with glee knowing

I am the only golfer in the world hitting a Billy Casper driver.

Cost me a buck at a Reedsport thrift store that benefits the developmentally disabled.

No irony with the Billy Casper driver.

I just like the feel and sound of wood crushing rich men’s balls.

No one ever around when I tee off at dawn.

I play my left-to-right fade game,

decent off the tee,

mediocre irons,

a great short game

like my last round

where I rammed in three 15-footers for par

and chipped in for birdie from 90 feet,

heard nothing but wind whipping through

the gallery of Sitka spruces,

a quiet roar I counted as applause.

I wish I hadn’t thrown out my dad’s Doug Ford blade irons after he died.

I’d carry that 2-iron he could never hit.

I never understood why he cheated at golf,

foot wedge his favorite club.

Maybe it had something to do with that cold night on train guard duty

as a 21-year-old Marine in the Korean War.

A communist infiltrator behind the lines

appeared in front of his sand-bagged emplacement

and he fired a .30 caliber machine gun

at point black range,

spraying him with blood, bone and body.

That might explain the cheating in most aspects of his life.

Or explain nothing.

He never talked about combat until the months before died,

and I reminded him of the time in junior high

when he told me clouds overhead,

pointing to them,

as we played the first hole at Oregon City Golf Club,

looked exactly like the clouds during a mortar barrage

that he survived because he dug a foxhole better than most.

I remember those clouds and sometimes search for that formation

while playing golf alone.