A Little Tête-à-tête

Coleridge, it is me, your affectionate friend!
Might I interrupt you from your compositions, for a little tête-à-tête,
lure you even, to a tee-off on our emerald
swath of watered, manicured sward?

We have shattered new frontiers with our 14 golf courses.
A dexterous harmony of manmade & natural hazards,
Fairway glades surrounded by shimmering leafwhelmed mountains
of tinted Tallow Trees, pars graced with stately stemmed flame
throated birds-of-paradise & dewed
melon flowers.

& vigilantly raked sand bunkers, so many in one par,
this sand cratered par looks hauntingly extra-terrestrial.
We have a 150 yard beach bunker—sand imported from
the sucrose beaches of the Caribbean!
There are manmade lakes, the water dyed a cool, hushed slate,
pocked with waterfowls & verdant hillocks of island green & a putting
green mown to velvet uniformity.

This will be the world's premier tournament venue,
Already visited by Nick Faldo (I have seen a wax likeness of him
at your homeland's Madame Tussaud's), Annika Sorenstam,
& of course, the Great Tiger Woods.

You may notice an absence of golf carts,
but we are currently waiting for the newest generation
of multiple passenger rough terrain utility vehicles,
which should arrive next month.

Our temporary solution to this lack is an entrusted,
well-trained army of caddies.
That there, the compact little man in the plaid culottes is Xiao.
Oh, he's not scowling at you, he's scowling at me but he doesn't know
that I know this: Pig! Better not stir shit up! I'm watching you!
You must excuse caddies for of course,
they are prone to human error.

Dash off? Why must you dash off?
To dash down what you just dreamed? But my friend,
I've already dreamed up this Xanadu,
a mere 40 miles from Shangdu, with the profits of my lint rollers
& rolls of polysynthetic fur! Oh, I see: every second
you stall until you write your Opiate dream down,
your lush Elysian visions will escape your grasp,
& your verse will finish leadenly.

Allow me to wipe the crusted sleep from your eyes with my thumbs.
When I was a child, I had untreated pink eye & my ma
used to wipe the mucus tearing from my eyes, while she smoked her
endless cigarettes to calm the parasites in her stomach.
Outside the perimeters of Shangdu, we have a row
of Country Housing Garden estates. My little girl lives
in one of these houses, wishing to be a poet like you.
Will you go & tutor her? I will pay you handsomely.
I always tell her, you must practice everyday.
She practices, everyday.




Poem copyright © Cathy Park Hong. All rights reserved. Originally published in Parnassus. Reprinted with the permission of the author.