The Widow Revisits Golfball Graveyard in Dimond Park

Afternoons we stayed in Dimond Park
and mornings, too, when young bodies
sang with new notes inside a pendulum
swinging up and down.

The children climbed monkey bars
and screamed on the slide in the sandbox
where every kind of dog buried its shit
and walked away pleased

until it was time to hike the canyon
filled with mudrocks and ferns.
Green parasols shaded wet feet
as we heaped mouths with blackberries,

and wove fingers between hairy thorns.
In summertime, it was quiet and cool.
Bay laurel trees arched above our heads,
a processional to the graveyard

where golf balls
from the driving range at Trestle Glen
lay buried at the edge of the stream
like giant roe waiting to be fertilized,

some orange, many white, a few
had already shed their outer peel.
They were not our keepers.
Something else had found them.

The game was about how many balls
children could stuff inside their pockets
without rolling back down.
Not the kids. The balls

swelled our pockets, lumps
which were less like grapes
and more like lymph nodes
nursed by loving hands.

And now as I look up the canyon,
past the tangled blackberries
and water spilling over rocks
with pyramids of dog shit

edging the path in mold, all I have left
are hard bits of memory
that line my own pocket.
I touch them over and over again.