The Stonewall Players

Unplublished Walt Whitman Article on Golf

 

          I sing to you, America.  I sing to you the graces, the beauty, the godliness of a golf course.  Have you reckoned one much?  It is hundreds of acres of grass, different shades, different lengths, a different feel to each blade.  Have you ever laid naked on the fairway, America?  While the groundskeeper looks on, I massage the smooth, faceless grass with my beard, listening to the earth hiccup.  There on the 6^th hole, bison once grazed with head visors firmly in place, calculating the sums of the universe.  Time is but an instant and endless and Pontius Pilate is doing pull-ups on the 12^th hole, his sweat pooling at his feet, spawning a field of magnolias.  I am for 6 irons and for 8 irons.  I am for the driver and for the putter. But mostly I am for lying in the sand trap with Cody, the groundskeeper’s son while we discuss the heavens exploding, the particles bursting and crackling into infinity while the blacksmiths learn to herd cattle, the smell of Poseidon leaking from their pores.  All truths wait in all things and so it is that I too must wait before I know how many people saw me spinning in circles near the lake imploring a geologist to slap me in the face.  I eat cheddar by the 7^th hole.  My tongue feels like Cortez, after something swims within his ken.  I offer some to the geese who soon fly off in the formation of Aristotle bowling.  I wish I were a Colossus, inhaling clouds and making tributaries with my heel.  I would fold this golf course up and give it to a bear with cataracts as a present.  If I could be a month of the year, I would be July and it would be warm and the fireworks would explode above us while the builders would build and the able bodied mothers would birth their children and the whalers would eat mint ice cream and I would tell them it was made by the daughters of the revolution with their long arms and three stomachs filled with a ravenous light.  I believe in you, golf course.  I believe in your putting greens where solemn waiters tend to Franciscan monks that order grits and pancakes and manuscripts that show the way to heaven.  I believe in the 15^th hole fairway where the gypsies play their native games and eat curry and ride vast, teasing elephants in search of a rough patch they will never find.  I believe in the lake in the middle of the course where hundreds of creatures live, some visible, others not, some from the present, others from a mustier age, all of them live and breathe the same as you and I.  I believe in you as well, America. I always have and will.