Country Club Concerns

We ate strawberries
glazed with sugar
over vanilla ice cream
with small dessert spoons,
feeling like giants
in the dining room
beneath the moose head
staring down from his place
above the trophy case.
You picked at a spot of wax
on the table cloth,
red like nosebleed
on a square of tissue,
and wondered
what was wrong with us,
where our passion went?

Maybe dullness is the whetstone
for something pointed yet to come,
I said, but I don’t have
good answers, or clever ones,
only guesses.

Outside, it was snowing
sideways, a billowing sheer
masking the eighteenth hole:
a lone Coca-Cola branded
patio umbrella
rocked by a gale
the two of us, protected
like cherries in a jar,
could only imagine.

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Bill Brymer is a writer and photographer from Louisville, Kentucky. A Pushcart-nominated poet, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, Prairie Schooner, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Tar River Poetry, Southwest Review, Poetry South, Yearling, and other publications.