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Surplus pine fence pickets make the cross,
her name scrawled down the arms,
a handful of flowers x-wired to the epicenter.
She left under a colossal sky, on land falling away to the canyon,
the road scarcely two lanes wide, within sight of town.
That June, the field would have been prolific with harvest’s promise.
Now, the marker towers over six weeds sprouting,
ragged and unwanted, in the sandy turnrow.
FM 656
Hall County, Texas
The tall one, brutally white against black cliffs,
guards her trio of petite replicas.
Anonymous symbols of sadness,
they seem permanent – certainly more permanent
than the lost lives they represent.
How will I feel, rounding this curve, if they are gone?
State Highway 118
Jeff Davis County, Texas
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
At the corner of War Highway and the state road,
a white wooden cross shares space
with a pair of creosoted utility poles.
The cross is embellished with fabric hibiscus,
a flower more at home tucked behind
the ears of flirtatious dusky-haired girls
than on the high plains.
Spirals of thin wire hold the flowers – tiny rust spots
marking where predecessors were bound.
A not-yet-faded price tag reveals the blossoms
cost $2.99 per bundle. Self-adhesive,
scarcely-reflective mailbox letters name the cross.
At night, the bright wood reflects traffic signals' glow,
advancing ever on through their amber-red-green-amber
progression. Down Emma’s right arm,
a telephone pole across the road mirrors her cruciformed shape.
State Highway 114
Lubbock, Texas
The distant blue wedge of the Apache Mountains is too far away to shelter a god-forsaken road, connecting what a tornado left behind in Saragosa and what Interstate commerce abandoned in Pecos. Out here, not much is white – still-standing whitewashed walls of a roofless house, blanched bones. Or crosses.
Planted in a mound of reddish sand, the back one stands on a flimsy wire tripod, a misdirected funeral offering. In front, on a more elaborate marker, new, red-white-blue flowers hide names, dates.
And this: a Christmas wreath hanging backward and a litter of tiny stuffed animals, road-dirty and gritty from wind-powered sand.
State Highway 17
Reeves County, Texas
A huge fiberglass building blooms beside the road,
its vaulted rooms guarded by razor wire, security cameras.
Inside, genetically perfect vegetables ripen on plants
whose roots will never push through
warmth of prodigal earth, whose leaves won’t know
the bite of murderous insects, whose flowers
won’t burn from direct sunlight,
harsh and unfiltered.
Instead, the parents of these vegetables
live in climate-controlled wonder,
their roots safely submerged in nutrient-rich water.
An relentlessly-dry drainage channel cuts under the road,
its path marked by three reflective diamonds,
the sharp orange of squash blossoms. Beyond,
two crosses are woven into the fence.
The bottom of each cross is pointed, ready to be pushed
into forgiving soil, but these crosses dangle
helplessly in the air,
as far from dirt as are domed hydroponic plants.
Instead of tomatoes, these crosses bear fruit
of satin flowers –
flowers that will never ripen, never wilt.
State Highway 17
Jeff Davis County, Texas
For anyone whose faith is ratified by
big churches, large congregations, massive crosses
this narrow wire one offers little consolation.
From certain angles
it isn’t even a cross but a thin green line
hovering over crisp new flowers.
Sunlight and grasshoppers pass through it,
flowing freely toward the ether.
Grief takes its turn
rippling the sky as it passes through.
Maybe a solid cross could have frozen the flight.
US 67/90
Presidio County, Texas
Under sun nearly hot enough to ignite a flame,
the devotional candle melts, leaving a lardy blotch
in the compressed, sandy soil.
A bouquet of pink blooms and glossy ribbon –
dotted with the never-dry tears of acrylic dewdrops –
is wedged between two new yuccas.
A figurine of a blond girl dangles
from the center of a large wreath,
a bluebird held in her outstretched,
uplifted left hand.
Behind the girl, inky clouds build,
their enraged colors swirling forward
delivering, then leaving behind,
air made cleaner and cooler by their violence.
US 84
Guadalupe County, New Mexico
Like leftover Christmas, broken Coke and Topo Crico bottles glitter beside the long-armed cross, full of her many names.
A second cross disintegrates – shards of white satin ribbon droop, ever more brittle and yellowed, while tiny Styrofoam hailstones drift down from the cross’s body, to lie caught up in weeds and glass.
A broken fence post, struggling to do its job, points straight to the crosses.
State Highway 17
Presidio County, Texas
Down at the fenceline,
next to the memorials and looking up
toward the highway,
parallel arced tracks show where the spirits –
freed on impact – left their containers
and fled, up the rise, gaining
speed, creating loft,
until at the crown of the road, they lifted off,
catapulting themselves
into the sky,
to become
stars, clouds, shades of blue, the moon.
Flung skyward, these spirits are
pollux, elnath, arrakis, sadalbari;
cumulonimbus, mammatus, pileus;
cerulean, azure, lapis, or sapphire;
long nights moon, the moon of winds,
the moon of red grass appearing:
each a memory watching over who was left behind.
State Highway 17
Jeff Davis County, Texas
An engineer must have placed this cross, which stands at attention beside the fence, its arms lining precisely with the second strand of wire.
A geometric red ornament with name and dates provides the only color in the scene.
East Navajo Drive
Hobbs, New Mexico
This one faces away from oncoming highway traffic and instead looks at the unpaved road its red dirt as hard as the months-long drought.
Two large silver conchos adorn the arms like surrendering palms turning toward sunlight.
In the late winter afternoon thin light distills everything into shades of tan.
The top of the cross from la familia is crowned by two glass door pulls, screwed one into the other.
US 62/82
Lea County, New Mexico
Edges of asphalt
Solid yellow lines down the middle
Fenceposts on either side
Taunt wires between
Only this cross breaks that pattern:
a simple white blip
against the fence.
A red rectangle notes a name, some dates,
a message:
KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER.
But in the thirty four years since,
who’s bothered to read the sermon?
State Highway 349
Martin County, Texas
In this arid land,
the simple cross of skinny round pipe
has two overlapping circles stationed at the top
and the bottom.
The circles are rusting,
algae crawling up from the depths
of prehistoric oceans to reclaim what it once owned.
Outskirts of Marfa, Texas
Bargain hunters searching a gross of paper towels or a tank of cheap gas pass Wendall’s marker.
Cheerful new flowers obscure his name, written in a plump, rounded hand with a black Sharpie.
Maybe Wendall’s wife has a case of flowers, a box of Sharpies that she buys at Sam’s, just across the road.
South Cherry Lane
White Settlement, Texas
JAKE stands out, a bloodless wound
against the dark plank.
A slim ruby ribbon holds this trinity to the cross:
a pair of stems and dessicated blooms
as brittle as life
a note
its message rain-washed to the ground
a canary-yellow star
(a sheriff’s badge? a baby rattle?)
glowing like the cosmos.
US 87
Lubbock County, Texas
You don’t have to be a trained accident investigator to decipher this one – a curve, three teenagers, New Year’s Day.
Two crosses are narrow white metal, but the third is different: heavy wood, curvy at the ends, with a single name carved into it. The wood is starting to weather, and the once-crisp letters are softer.
Behind the crosses. black, bare tree limbs claw against the angry sky.
FM 1228
Kent County, Texas
The sad-faced Jesus, hanging on his cross, has turned away from the road, the intersection, the airport. A faded Christmas wreath circles him, only one fake pinecone clinging to its plastic boughs. Nine whitewashed stones – a trinity of trinities – curve out from the base of the cross and just beyond the airport sign points out the way to leave.
State Highway 17
Presidio County, Texas
In the shadow of the craggy cross, a pair of long-neck beer bottles nestle together in the shade, like rabbits waiting out the noonday heat.
A fan belt circles the cross’s arms, a sharp-edged red reflector tucked into one end. Two pieces of broken mirror and a flat, chalky rock are carefully balanced on top of the arms. A crack in the belt will hang on for one more summer, maybe two, before it breaks through and the whole thing collapses.
Oxidized barbed wire is z-ed at the intersection of arms and upright, where two Carta Blanca caps are tacked, their red color slowly fading under the western sun.
A single railroad spike on the top of the cross shudders as the eastbound Union Pacific storms past, blessing the sacred aggregate of things left behind.
US 87
Presidio County, Texas
State Highway 52
Morgan County, Missouri
Are you his people?
I was at home that day, the day it happened. I was waiting on my son to come by to carry me up to St. Joe to my sister’s funeral. I’d just lost my husband, you see, and wasn’t up to the drive.
Those two cars hit, and there was a fire and that boy and his little dog died. You could hear the dog, too, for a minute, but it seemed a lot longer. An ambulance came of course – the closest one is from Sedalia – but by then it was just too late.
His people do come by, sometimes, and put out new flowers. I get my grandson to mow around it.
No, it doesn’t bother me to have this outside my window.
But I can still remember that little dog’s howl.
US 65
Benton County, Missouri
At the first traffic light since Muleshoe, a road siphons cars to WalMart, fertilizing the weeds of urban fringe – self-storage units, metal-building Bible churches, seasonal fireworks stands.
Woven into the bottom two squares of a gridded wire fence the cross tilts outward, struggling against its confines. Prevailing winds and airborne dirt have blasted names, dates from the boards.
The vertical piece of the cross is splayed like fingers on an outstretched hand, from a sledgehammer driving the memorial, strike by blow, as if to pommel grief into molecule-sized pieces, on the chance that smaller grief may be easier.
Time, and development, march toward this marker. Soon it will become an entrance to a convenience store and the frayed KOA campground sign in the field behind it will become a slick neon version showing the latest gasoline prices or what soft drinks are on sale.
And the cross will be but a narrow memory.
North Frankford Avenue
Lubbock, Texas
All that is left of the sheltering cross is a metal rectangle with shards of rotted wood inside.
The three little crosses are still there, one with blue flowers, one with white-going-to-yellow ones, and the third one featuring patriotic themed florals.
In front of the middle cross, a pearly white cherub, wearing a patient expression, holds a dove. Another smaller cherub wears a garland of pink and blue buds.
Though still looming large in my imagination, without the tall cross, the remaining ones are so small as to be nearly invisible.
State Highway 118
Jeff Davis County, Texas
I remember this one – when the rich local playboy’s car left the road, pinwheeling across pavement, dirt, cotton fields, flinging car parts and occupants as it went.
I remember this detail – the playboy and his much-younger companion didn’t survive. I saw this – only one cross, weathered white with a medallion in the center. It leans against a telephone pole, while a non-denominational church sits in hard judgment across the road. A boll weevil trap is only a few feet away and tire marks in the sand show where state scientists steered around the cross on their way to check for bugs.
I forgot this – her name and mine are the same.
South Indiana Avenue
Lubbock, Texas
State Highway 19
Crawford County, Missouri
Maria and her children – Heber, Lynette, and Elizabeth – died against an elderly elm tree. Road-side darkened bark and melted asphalt suggest an inferno. It was Christmas Eve.
Employees of the McDonald’s in the next town put a sign on the tree, giving names and dates. In the years since the accident, Maria’s birth year has been amended and she’s now two years younger. A scrawled message from JR and JJ states WE LOVE YOU. The once-red sign has faded to a golden color. Items around the tree have vestiges of holidays: three candy cane ornaments, plastic fir fronds stuck in roadside tumbleweeds.
Above the sign a heart-shaped wreath, decorated with plastic roses and daisies, has been nailed to the tree.
Four flowers are gone.
US 67
Presidio County, Texas
Roads’ perpendicular intersection displays geometric precision on land so level, so austere, that the horizon scribes a perfect circle. Under the skinny rhythm of power poles, the saffron CAUTION sign posted on a gunmetal utility box is directed to diggers, and not to drivers.
The admonishment didn’t help: a bone-colored cross, a wreath with vermilion flowers, a pair of praying hands glow like burnished pewter in feverish midday light.
US 62/82 and FM 2236
Lubbock County, Texas
Interstate 80
Elko County, Nevada
Informal square-rocked stairs lead up the cliff. Lately, someone climbed here to put a red rose at the base of the cross.
In this light, a thick drip of paint, a slow teardrop of loss, casts its own shadow.
State Highway 118
Jeff Davis County, Texas
Perpendicular to each other, two small white crosses dot the right-of-way. Deliberate placement indicating blame?
Facing the same direction the accompanying stone cherubs stare blankly toward the road, toward the pass, their cones of vision never intersecting.
State Highway 9
near Fairplay, Colorado
Cupped by the road’s downhill curve, the stand of overgrown trees
crowds two crosses, their shameless whiteness rising suddenly in the descending darkness.
Both crosses keep the same red-on-white
color scheme, though rust spots escape the paint on the flower-ornamented shorter one.
Where does this end? Will the bearer
of flowers have to place an
even taller marker?
Santa Rosa, New Mexico
Holland Street and Ave. E end their trial separation just west of town, one way pairs joining to become the highway. Together now, they make a lazy, flat S approach to the railroad line, then head due west.
Just as the road straightens, a white cross flutters several flags, some faded to just soft cloth rectangles, others recent enough to have full colors. On one, the red stripes are gone, leaving only white ribbons and a starfield.
JAVIER GOMEZ is branded into the cross’s arms with such force that the wood is concave, melted into a cupped shape.
US 67/90
just west of Alpine, Texas
Skinny road threads between black cliff, cold river. On the curve’s cusp, the well-ordered cross hugs a rock, a tree.
Routed edges of bright pine boards catch filtered mountain sun. A ring of faded blue flowers cups FATHER-stamped wood and a pot of flowers lies overturned, as though flung container-first from a passing car.
State Highway 63
San Miguel County, New Mexico
...was 35 years old, according to the wavy welding on the arm.
A stuffed pony, the victim of weather and years, hangs from the middle of the cross, garroted by white twisted wire. Red plastic roses are poked behind the crossbar, and an American flag, stapled to a dowel, hangs mournfully, the edges frayed into tattered red ribbons.
US 62/82
Gaines County, Texas
Just past the first curve in miles
faded flowers snared in barbed wire
call attention to a pile of stones
that support a small brown cross –
nameless, dateless.
A mechanical pencil
stands with military precision in the stones,
placement too precise to have been random.
In the narrow cattle trail behind the fence,
a fresh cow patty bakes in the sun,
soon to dry to a rippled weightless pile,
another unmarked symbol of life.
State Highway 118
Jeff Davis County, Texas
State Highway 19
Crawford County, Missouri
The second least-populated county in the state just got a little smaller.
The cross is made from cedar posts that could be stolen from the fence across the road. Red zip ties hold plastic ivy and an old wreath to the arms.
US 380
Kent County, Texas
Inside a curve, on top of a rock, the tole-painted white cross oversees its universe:
pieces of broken rear-view mirror, reflecting tiny bits
of the hazy summer sky
implied-water of distant cottonwoods
pipe-organs of black cliffs
pale feathery mesquite leaves grabbing at its head
State Highway 17
Jeff Davis County, Texas
Staked on the outside of the curve, the cross leans away from the harboring cliff as if seeking sun. Behind it, and above, a dozen yucca spikes – not yet in bloom but considering it – lean out at the same angle.
State Highway 17
Jeff Davis County, Texas
US 380
Throckmorton, Texas
This one leans away from oncoming traffic, settling comfortably back against the soft hill. A tulle bow explodes from the center, a feminine, childish ornament for Dean, who was almost 54.
Highway 54
Callaway County, Missouri
The wind is unrelenting, bawling at the advent of spring, pushing away, winning – at least for a few more days – the war of approaching warm days.
Three feet from the lightly-ridged concrete shoulder, two crosses sway against the onslaught. The one with a rebar backbone and a brick foundation is more stable than the other. Orange flowers don’t have a chance, and are peeled away one at a time, bouncing along the ground until snagged by tenacious spikes of last year’s weeds, where they’ll be the next time the mower comes along.
Interstate 27
Swisher County, Texas
By Easter Saturday, roadside grasses are already green even though snow streaks across the white sky. Five weather-rough pine crosses lean as winter wind pushes them south toward summer. A plastic American flag, stripes made from red and white flowers, has only 23 plastic snap-on stars remaining in place.
Interstate 27
Swisher County, Texas
The dust cloud on the horizon roils forward
blurring the edges of land, of sky.
Blue above still, but not for long.
The heavy metal cross leans against a light post.
Pieces of welding show remains of a name, a date
and today’s wind seems strong enough to have
blown the rest of away.
The white paint on the cross is marked with amoebas of rust,
bare metal breaking through on the windward edge.
In the distance, flight 2581 fights the wind,
lifts off, then curves away into the blue.
North Martin Luther King Boulevard
Lubbock, Texas
