For a while the field above me went hard and flat and hot, a black crust laid over the good cool soil like a scab, and I did not mind, because I have been under seas and I have been under ice and this was only another skin the world was trying on for a season.
The quick warm things come here in shells. They roll in on round feet, four to a shell, and the shell stops, and the small heat inside it climbs out and hurries away, and then, some hours later, the same heat hurries back and the shell rolls off again. They do this all day.
They do it in a great flustered agitation, the shells nosing and pausing and lining up in rows like beetles that have agreed on nothing. In the low light of what I take to be summer, the black crust drinks the warmth and holds it long after the sky has cooled, so that I feel their little going and coming as a fever that never quite breaks.
Water finds the edges first, as water always does. Already there is a seam near my shoulder where the crust has cracked, and one thin green thread has pushed up through it, patient in the way I understand, reaching. That thread will be a tree before the crust is halfway gone. The tree will lift the whole flat skin and shrug it into gravel.
They painted careful yellow lines across the top of it, to tell the shells where to rest. I will not be awake to see the last of the paint.
But I will be here for the soil, and the soil, unlike the yellow lines, does not forget where it was going.