Memory Markers

     To destinations.  We rush or lurch to focus points, there to begin.  As if the setting must be achieved before the story. These highway lines the repetition between two points.  Habitualized by tar and rubber:  automatons with alarms, in automobiles.  We speed like two ton machines of metal, impervious before and after the sun in slush, giggling at a dj's disrespect, glancing at the flash of a text.  The guy in the gray sedan next lane pretends invisible and picks his nose. Yawn.  And brake.  Reach out and scrape the ice forgotten on the mirror.  Cradle the phone and cuss the coffee cold with half and hour left to go.  Shit!  When is this asshole going to let me in?  Now the traffic stops again.  I've only made it to the Terrell Constantine In Loving Memory Don't Drink and Drive sign.  There are new pink plastic flowers holding grey snow.  Someone tied packages and ribbons to the post.  A blink of stuffed animal in plastic then the white van with ladders on top starts to move again.  A couple of feet. It stops.  A new blue sign below the Verizon billboard.  In Loving Memory Ami Alonzega and Krista Marie Campos Don't Drink and Drive.  That little spot of land has become sacred in its insistence that we notice there were lives that have gone.  In Bolivia there are wooden crosses along the carretera where people have died and you cross yourself and kiss your fingers as you pass.  Acknowledgement of the holy.  And I wonder about the dirt beneath the concrete.  How many crosses fall and are not replaced?  Before there were highways, who died on this spot two hundred years ago?  Was the sign placed exactly where they died?  They couldn't put it in the middle of the road.  Any given dot on this blue dot could be where someone died.  Or where someone was born.  Maybe all Earth has been consecrated. We cannot read the memory of the soil:  where it was brought from, where it has blown.  Sometimes, only, when we stop so we can see.