Nirvana, Yes or No                                                                                                   

                        All my changes were there.

                                                —Neil Young

Don’t ask me how it happened.

One day, right on your stoop,

outside-looking-in showed itself

the sad cartoon it is. Like your

freshman colic that first trip home,

towing nothing but an extrinsic new

haircut and bigger changes no one

wanted in their stocking. One foot

tucked into a spiny shell that already

swallowed your pride. The other foot

never left the vestibule, familiar ropy

rain yeast holding the ether of you all.

You’re nineteen or so.

When aroma and memory begin

disclosing themselves, custodians

of the real.

And you want to believe it’s easy

now, returning to the abandoned

house. The haircut’s cut, barely

a footnote in your morning toilette.

The goatee doesn’t even pretend

to mitigate a long-softened jaw.

You’re upright, both feet docked

at port, where you’ve got used

to dropping bits of yourself into

the cog of endless pelagic eclipse.

Above all, there’s no one waiting

at the door, steaming pottage

of star-crossed, guilt-laden love

for you in their hands.

Point is, would you now

step round to the back lawn,

inch down the fern spoilage,

nose up the crawlspace

trim lodged under the tract?

Then press a nostril

to the fungus-bloomed lamina

between you and whatever you

left untouched inside?

The door’s wedged in a reef

of thirty-year silt. From here,

there’s no hedging how you once

thought secrets made their way

into the light: the naïve graffito

of imagined, undelivered

punishments, scrawled behind

what ended up as guiltless forgotten

vapors, passed from nitrogen-soaked

sod to shredded baseball cowhide,

fomenting a dahlia bulb that burst between

splinters, then withdrew before anyone

could unearth it at the frost.

October Hill, Summer 2021