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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
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
