Crosses
 

A white cross looms on the highway horizon, the only rest stop for fifty miles. Tiny marble crosses swarm the base—In Memory of All the Unborn Children. At the mouth of the parking lot, a steel donation box demands payment. Behind the bathrooms, bronze statues of Jesus and the thieves carrying their loads, slouching in an infinite circle. A woman and her husband ask me to take their picture—she holds up her hands to Christ, as if to collect his blood.

At Rose Hill, the dead have bought riverside property. Lost branches of family trees abandon the tombs, while the ancient limbs swing along the boulevard, blooming in their Sunday finest. They wait for visitors to sit around the ponds, beside trickling streams, spy marble angels peeking from behind fallen magnolias. Orchestras once played in the bandstand, but no one sings for the hidden dead whose bricked caves carve the hillside.

Knees kneel under black umbrellas, the rain makes mush of the stony narrow avenues. Priestesses swaddle their heads in purple, gold, and green rags, pin pouches at their waists and fill them with feathers. They paint crosses on sealed death-vessel doors, ox-blood on marble and tarnished brass names. The ground regurgitates the dead, so they lay above it in pairs, coupled like serpents on the ark, ash mingling with ash.

We’re bone and blood, motes swirling in the wind. Our memorials prove our faith, bargain for salvation, make shrewd deals with death. But the flesh is shredded when the soul claws itself alive, then dissolves into air. So break my bones and suck the marrow. Wrap my body in cheesecloth. Anoint my hair with oils. Bury me beneath a tree. Let me rot. Don’t weigh me down. Don’t etch crosses on me.