Ode to Tiger
He has not thrust down his youth untried
into a place where splendors are hidden.
—Pindar, Isthmia VIII
Fourteen yards past Daly on the drives, he makes
the par five green in two despite the woods.
When he went pro he’d just turned twenty-one,
an instant millionaire: both down to earth
and off the scale—from birdies made per round
to eagle frequency. We watch. “It was,”
his mother Tida boasted, “like he was
the pope!” at Disney World that year. (He
makes,
without a white golf cart, his holy rounds.)
Followers out of fairways, out of the woods,
crowding close enough to hear the earth
swept by his swing—they cannot see. For
one,
the crowds are tripled now. And two, no one
can catch this Nike swoosh before it was,
before we sense the shudder of the earth.
A Leroy Neiman blur, he is the art he makes.
The galleries hang on his tee shot three woods
outdriving drivers nearly every round.
He widens the world of sports. He makes it
round
and rests and calls it good. Come,
hole-in-one.
Never caught off guard with coulds or woulds
before the human press, he is, and was
always, a student of the game, making
the grades. And even as the greens, of earth,
his name is colorful. Who on earth
could bring a world of racial strife around
to this, an afternoon of peace-making?
The kid who’s “fundamentally sound,” says one
(the bear) Jack Nicklaus. That’s who. Tiger was
swinging “before he could walk,” said Earl Woods.
I think there are most tigers in the wood
¾from
Wilbur’s “Ceremony” now unearths
a different rite: our Sunday news. What was
the woods turns tiger—if we stick around.
What’s nestled in the toughest rough is one
more opportunity to prove what makes
a man a hero here on earth. The woods
are stakes to go around, or over, making
a man a man beyond the one he was.
Published
in
Passages North.