Night Golf

I remember the night I discovered, lying in bed in the dark, that a few imagined holes of golf worked much better than a thousand sheep, that the local links, not the cloudy pasture with its easy fence, was the greener path to sleep. How soothing to stroll the shadowy fairways, to skirt the moon-blanched bunkers and hear the night owl in the woods. Who cared about the score when the club swung with the ease of air and I glided from shot to shot over the mown and rolling ground, alone and drowsy with my weightless bag? Eighteen small cups punched into the bristling grass, eighteen flags limp on their sticks in the silent, windless dark, but in the bedroom with its luminous clock and propped-open windows, I got only as far as the seventh hole before I drifted easily away - the difficult seventh, 'The Tester' they called it, where, just as on the earlier holes, I tapped in, dreamily, for birdie.