Had You Followed Me Home

An old poem: for October and November, for quirks, for happy times and timely goodbyes.

Had You Followed Me Home
For all the things that never happened with you,
and all the things that shouldn't have happened to anyone else.

If you had followed me here, we’d be in the breaking leaves
behind my parents’ house—the dying earrings of the cottonwood
litter the grass, the chopped onions from a mower blade in a lawn salad.
Your warm Pacific blood would move slowly and
you’d beg my worn Midwestern hands to assure you—
You’d stand, swirled by yard dusts and flakes,
and I’d touch your knee and smile with my father’s laughter
when we’d meet him for pizza on an October Thursday in Chicago.
We’d see my high school friends and sing our way to the all-night diner
that’s been made-over (purple ceilings and yellow walls) by the
Greeks who’ve owned it for the last five-hundred years or so.
Holding the menu half open, you’d order—no, ask for—chocolate cake and
my friends would taunt and tease you, actions typically reserved for me.
I’d swipe a taste of the frosting and bury myself in the corner of the booth,
green glows for irises at the impossibility of you on the vinyl with me.
Had you followed me home, you’d have seen Chicago play a symphony of who I am:
the Metra hum beats percussion with State Street brass and theater light strings
and my hometown, my mother’s house—its mellow reeds play woodwind tones.
In grass under cotton shade, we—with closed eyes—would float on
the rising of the suburban orchestra and then, with the birth of these thoughts,
you’d tune the masterpiece and call it love.