Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, Sarah Cortez

A Plain, White Cross

It lists slightly
beside the highway.
Whoever placed it there
drove its upright

deep into the earth,
intimate with the tragedy
of wind and driving rain.
Knowing the certainty

of erasure, they left it
nameless, just a simple
wooden cross harboring,
for a while, the traces

of unbearable loss.
As if lit from within
with white light, it glows
beside the silent highway:

white light stark
as the grief of the bereaved,
white as the clouds above,
streaking, disintegrating.