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The Hedge Road

        for my father

Finally a day not cold enough to keep us in.
We drive out of town on a road I should know
the direction of. But north and south
all the same to me, no inner compass
like yours in my bones.
Since I've been gone,
they've put up street signs in the country.
You shake your head. Who needs them
here in beans and corn.
Today the fields are full
of snow. We pull on gloves and tighten
scarves across our faces, our few words
muffled by the wool. On this road
years ago, spring, we nearly got stuck
in mud, the Buick's tires spinning.
Ice this morning underfoot.
We walk with practiced gingerness.
No one out earlier than us
but animals—you show me deer tracks,
rabbit, the brush of a pheasant's wing
just before it flew.
In the branches arching over us, cardinals
and the berries of bittersweet
out of season. We've never seen them
this brilliant this late.
These trees are good for fence posts,
you say. Hard to break.
Hard, then, to cut, yet you did it,
and drove the posts deep, and strung the wire.
That was before I was born.
Still, by telling me, you make it
something else I can hold on to:
a wing feather, a stone from the road.

Driving Home

Hawk. Hawk. Different hawk.
All the way up the coast, we count them
sunning on the telephone poles,
their feathers bright after rain.
I am grateful for this break
in the weather, for the light
raking the fields of artichokes
and warming the bodies of familiar birds,
birds my parents would point out
every time we left the city,
my father's eye honed by miles
of highway driving, my mother's keen
since birth. For my whole life
and more, they've been together.
We are talking about love.
You tell me of your father's infidelity,
how your mother bore it. You want to believe
you would never hurt someone
or be hurt yourself like that,
but you worry about what we carry
in our blood and bones.
The bones of birds are hollow.
No wonder they can lift and go.
I swear my parents have been happy.

Melody Lacina grew up in Iowa and now lives in San Francisco.  Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, the North American Review, and Rattle.  Private Hunger (The University of Akron Press, 2002) is her first book.

"The Hedge Road" and "Driving Home" from Private Hunger, The University of Akron Press, copyright 2002 by Melody Lacina. Reprinted by permission of The University of Akron Press.

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