They'd been walking; it was something to do
  
 at sixteen when evening skimmed
 across the Minnesota prairie
 to their little college town. A cottony wind 
  
 swept the humid hours away
 with the late-waning sun.
 She called after dinner. He left home 
  
 and turned toward hers, walked past 
 flickering television-lit windows, laugh tracks 
 blending with cricket calls, until he saw her
  
 under an ochre cone of lamp light
 on a sidewalk halfway in between.
 They talked low and wandered
  
 along the edge of the golf course,
 took each other's hand and ventured
 step by step into darkness.
  
 Across temporarily abandoned lawns, 
 up to a little rise on the 16th tee
 where they sat and watched 
  
 shadowy shapes of trees on sable grasses
 overlap in a collage of construction paper scenery, 
 scissor-fringed pine branches 
  
 waving in the pitch, star-flecked
 glitter on the page and moon-glow 
 pooling like glue in the sand traps.
  
 They fell asleep there, together 
 on the grass. They did not dream
 of the future, of the damage and joy
  
 that would be drawn and torn
 in the space of another decade or two.
 They woke to daylight
  
 and a whole world
 cut from fresh sheets
 of yellow, blue and green.  
Midwestern Gothic 17

View of the Fairway was originally published in the pages of Midwestern Gothic, issue 17 (spring 2015).

Top photo (cc) Terry McCombs on flickr.