The 18th Green

Deal done and work won,

glasses raised and partners praised,

dictators backed and backs slapped,

regimes propped up and contracts mopped up,

it was getting late down at the club,

the light was fading, and it was time to hit the road.  

"Let's just play one last round of golf" you said,

as the barman wearily hollowed out another glass

with that cloth stump where his hand should be.

It was to be a round unlike any other,

the very last round ever. It was clear to me,

even at the time, as I stood up, and put down

my hastily half-drained glass upon the bar,

staggered down to the 1^st tee, and set up

my ball to start, that this would not end well.  

We advanced upon the 1^st fairway through barbed wire,

Not all of the caddies made it through the crossfire,

gas and minefields. The green was very well defended

with bunkers, trenches and gun emplacements.

We stopped on Christmas Day to play football for a while,

then returned to our golf clubs. New caddies were called.  

We sang "katyusha" and our rocket launchers screamed,

and from the 2^nd tee we launched our final counterstrike,

watching with satisfaction as the green was scorched

beneath the blinding flash and mushroom cloud

unleashed by our thermonuclear ingenuity. That'll teach 'em.

We drove up the 3^rd fairway in a stretch limo, in the back seat,

spilling our cocktails in our anonymous companions’ hair,

as their heads bobbed up and down in our laps

- an accidental fruit salad, all cherries and pineapple and pigtails -

and eventually reached the casino, the green laid out with baize,  

where we rolled dice in Havana in those crazy days before it fell,

and in Las Vegas, Sun City, Monte Carlo, and Macau.

Broke, we played mah-jong tiles on the tarmac

in some back alley in Shenzhen

in the cold steaming dawn of the long walk home.

If you remember the 4^th you weren't there: some drinking den

where memories of missed putts are sunk in shot glasses

by old and broken men, ill lit by crippled candles cut

to make more ends to burn, casting contorting shadows

of pole-dancers who are no longer there,

a writhing floor show beyond the point of no return. 

The 5^th fairway included a water hazard,

but we managed to play through dry-shod,

stroking our balls from one end of the deck to the other

in a nuclear submarine parked beneath the polar ice-cap,

being careful not to slice the ball

in case we sent it ricocheting over control panels

and accidentally started another war,

while high-definition polar bears above us despaired

in documentaries watched in well heated homes

around our globally warming world,

their starving cubs receding out of view on the retreating sea ice,

and inside the sub agents, codename Nemo and Noah, held our clubs,

while our Scotch rocks chimed and melted in the glass

beneath the beaming smile of an indoor nuclear sun,

and we toasted all our past victories,

our fortunes now declining in defeat,

and absent friends,

and as the petals fall from the rose I gave you long ago,

my lost but not forgotten love, I commemorate

our private grief here with public catastrophe

and fireballs bloom all around our garden of regrets.

We read about the 6^th in Gibbon's Decline and Fall,

in a footnote about Caracalla, one not found in popular abridgements,

noting an apocryphal description of an impromptu detour

while campaigning in Caledonia,

his army deviating from scorched earth and genocide for a few days,

straying off one course to try another in the East Neuk.

No A9 back then. The Romans would have dualled it.

Modern scholarship disputes whether there even is a 6^th green.

The Mayan Calendar describes an approach, somewhat cryptically,

from which most stray into the rough, somewhat elliptically ...

And so we ended up stuck in a bunker on the 7^th fairway.

We hacked away in a leisurely way in Ravenna and Capri

with waning enthusiasm, occasionally catching the attention

of some idle or imprisoned chronicler whose Consolation

or Secret History we’d read, laugh at and burn,  

and on the beach in Ibiza in the afternoon

we’d try our best without success for several centuries

to summon up the effort,

distracted by empire and indolence in equal measure,

until at last Attila said we had incurred a penalty

and told us we should play on, but only once the needle lifted

off the Café del Mar track he was playing.

The hole on the 8^th green had been made by a rabbit

and we all know what that leads to.

The 9^th green was observed rather than played.

We viewed it calmly, head propped on a forearm,

elbow in one palm, chin in the other,

after a walk through the Tuileries Gardens to the Louvre,

where the picture was hung: the Virgin of the Rocks.

Leonardo painted that secret golf course long ago, hidden,

unseen, in a background landscape behind some angel

and our chubby saviour. We discussed it later in the consulate

over canapés, and were very impressed with ourselves,

until one of us was murdered in mysterious circumstances.   

It remains an enduring enigma to this day.

It is a problem to be solved by the hero of a cheap thriller

in an airport lounge during a particularly protracted layover

and everyone that matters is implicated in this conspiracy

that goes all the way to the top of the departures board.

A blind child holds the 10^th green up in the palm of his hand,

a pocketful of bleached radioactive dust. He lifts up generations

from the brown ground bone sand of some post-apocalyptic beach,

he holds it out to us, then steps back, forever just out of reach,

leading us on to sink into a thick sick swaying slick of pink poisoned sea

in that half-remembered nightmare that fills our morning with unease,

as we struggle to work out if it was guilt

or premonition that disturbed our sleep

when we crossed the dateline at 50,000 feet,

waking as the stewardess offers us a cooked or continental breakfast.

We ride a distant vapour trail high in the boy's blue sky

from which the bomb fell on his atoll all those years ago.   

Touchdown. The lush, Edenic 11^th was a surprise: a paradise

lost in the jungle since the dawn of time. Hidden from malice.

Life in all its wasteful abundance erupting in sound and colour,

sleeping loudly beneath the moon-spun silken shawl of night,

and rioting gloriously awake in the sun-torn day. In all innocence

we used machetes and chainsaws to hack through the noise

and heat and colour and light and glory of God to get to the green,

at any cost, and illegal loggers attended the flagstick for us.

It took the form of the last hardwood tree,

but they found to their dismay they couldn't put it back,

and so they made expensive furniture out of it instead,

so we could relax in what seemed like luxury at the time.

I'm sure my 5-iron hissed an angry complaint at some point

before slipping from my hand and slithering off like a snake,

never to be seen again among the tree stumps

and bare sterile earth eroding in blood red rivulets

to choke the delta with silt.

The 12^th was strip-lit and duty free.

The 13^th lined with statues.

The 14^th green was on the Moon.

The Russians wanted to play through,

but we said we would be finished soon

and then lost our clubs on re-entry,

along with the crew.

The 15^th fairway was patrolled by prostitutes

repeating every token promise we have ever made,

our broken promises and unspoken promises,

our shame, our fame, our blame,

believing our every boast for us. We’re all the same:

our staggering swaggering sad bravado,

our offer of a cheap, opportunistic afterthought of flowers,

the whole repertoire of condescension and menace,

until, in a moment of clarity, we realise we are doomed

as a single kiss opens a trap door in our heart,

transforms our stomach into a tar pit

where love eventually goes extinct,

and we sink trying to hold onto each other desperately

with our pathetic wee T-Rex arms flailing

so we don’t die alone  ...

We fracked the 16^th. The 17^th fairway blew away beneath us

as we made our slow progress on foot - soil erosion,

deforestation, desertification, climate change, whatever, who cares -

until the whole thing was one big bunker.

We found Pompeii and Skara Brae hidden in the dunes

just behind a Manhattan familiar from various disaster movie posters.

You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! 

John Knox fell off the Swilcan bridge and drowned,

and all the world's cults perished all around,

in a puddle of privatised water, face down,

and so we walked towards the 18^th godless and alone.

This 18^th fairway was built on exhausted urban land

on which was grown the world's last scraps of food

in a future that had always been inevitable, even from the start.

We feigned disorientation as we wandered in our wilderness

of entirely predictable predicaments.

We fertilised that land with what remained of our raw crude,

and on the 18^th green, where the flagstick stood,

we built the world's last oil rig derrick to get it.

With one stroke we sank the final putt.

We watched the ball roll and fall and rattle in the cup.

We walked across the last few blades of grass,

which we crushed under our feet as we passed

to retrieve the ball from where it came to rest,

only to find it had fallen into a bottomless pit

growing ever wider, the landfill into which we have tipped

everything ever bought,

but which no amount of ash and trash could ever fill,

a pit whose edges crumble under the weight of malls and parking lots,

a pit into which everything we ever built collapses.

We sought collective salvation from our individual sins

Folding hands in prayer, folding paper as money,

but the toppling steeples and minarets,

the fallen temples and trade centers still feed it

as the world buckles, collateral damage

in a war we wage only on ourselves.

You finally turned to me and with a smile said "that was good.

Wasn't it was worth it? Not a waste of a good walk.

What do you think?"

and as the last stunted uncut harvest burned down all around,

its thin tinder dry stems planted in fracked and gas soaked ground,

and all the bushes blazed, not with announcements of divinity,

but with that single quiet chorus of mute doom

(the void commemorates our passing only with unending silence),

and as the sparks and embers rose and mingled with the stars,

I said "it certainly wasn't a waste of a walk, but I need a drink"

and we returned directly to the bar.