Kathleen Ripley Leo
A road winds up the Apache Trail,
and we’re in our car,
Enya music playing ghostly on the radio,
sons in the back seat with their granite stones
taken from the Apache Trail and hiding, they just knew,
petroglyphs, and rock art under the grime.
They hide them under the front seat, Dad not one
to like them stealing stones from sacred places.
Just as they hide from us now, all grown up,
in the mountains of Colorado and Arizona.
I’ve toddled down a road straight thru
the center of Ohio, as flat as a pancake’s nose
with one car passing me and me passing it
and back and forth we companionably ride,
roadside farmhouses on the brink of their fields
and it seems no one is at home—where are the people
who farm the land, who stick their hand painted signs in their yards,
offering ostrich eggs, and ostrich sausage,
and they don’t answer their bell when I press it?
Roads lead secret lives, well kept secret lives
not unlike the double lives we lead, some of us,
those of us who are spies, or embezzle funds,
or have lovers, or are poets.
We all, to a one, lead well kept secret lives,
away from the media, and wonder where we’re going.