Omar

By August, spring-green grasses
are baked into crisp tawny stalks,
sharing the land with serrated
hilltops of inky-black rocks and cactus
the color of rotund green olives –
all under the oceanic vault of sky:
these are the colors of the desert.
The two blood-red splotches are wrong.

A heart, a football helmet, both cut
from plywood then bolted to a metal
u-shaped post, shimmer crimson with
WE
LOVE
YOU
OMAR
painted on the heart.

To the right and slightly behind,
picket-fence ends of a white wooden cross
puncture the scorched air.
At the base of the cross,
stones square enough to have been a wall,
and this:
broken taillight lenses, a snaky length of
weatherstripping, a piece of shattered
windshield held together by safety laminate
as glittery as leaded glass,
all placed carefully, as if to both reject
and reassemble loss.

One sun-faded bouquet is wired to the cross
and another one straggles
one fabric rose,
another one,
then the rest,
down the slope toward the road’s fatal curve.

EUMAR GUILLEN
DIED
DEC
11
1992
wanders unevenly across the marker,
scratched with a hand shaken by death’s bold move.

State Highway 166
Jeff Davis County, Texas