Tiger

It was nearly a year ago that we saw Tiger Woods. It was Melissa's birthday, and some friends had invited us to the Blue Martini for an after-dinner drink.

Tiger was sitting alone--or mostly alone, I should say--for most of the evening, behind security guards in a roped-off area of the club. There were a few minutes when he was sitting with an older gentleman, but the gentleman soon left, and Tiger was alone for the rest of the evening. He drank and texted, and I remember Melissa and I wondering why a person would choose to sit alone in a bar on the night after Christmas. We asked ourselves, Didn't he live in the area? And didn't he have a family?

Of course, much has been said recently about the allegations of his affairs, and I won't repeat them here. I don't even mean to condemn Tiger Woods or his actions here, only to comment on the loneliness that seemed to drape him then and to share a poem I wrote the following day.

At the time, I was writing a series of poems about doors, about the space of the threshold. To date, only one of those has been published, but if you're curious, you can find it in very good company in Rose Hunter's online journal YB--the spacing on the page isn't quite right there, but I know she's working on the formatting a bit. You can find the poem here and the commentary I wrote about it at the time here.

Which brings us back to this poem of a year ago.

Tiger

A rope, c-hook on its end, hanging loosely from an eye bolt.
A hired man, black jacket and earpiece, far exceeding the averages
for human height and weight. Sometimes, a door isn't a door at all.
Only an empty space through which we are allowed or not allowed to pass.

A path is cleared when he has to go, and when he returns,
always by a different route, to the table where he sits behind the rope,
behind the hired man, behind the rocks glass,
sending messages on his cellular phone.

And you say what a lonely life it must be, and we agree,
the life of a man whose name is known by everyone in this Orlando nightclub,
a man to whom no one will dare to speak, or even nod in the way that men do
when they recognize each other, when they mean no harm.