They poured a hot black skin over the field, and now nothing grows there but the walking creatures' hard-shelled beasts, which arrive in the morning light, go still, and cool in rows, and by dusk are gone again, so that the ground beneath is never allowed a single green thought.
I have watched this same acre since it was thistle and vole and the low silver of morning water pooling where the land dipped. The rain still tries to reach it. I feel the rain gather at my highest leaves and let it down slow along the grooves of my bark to my roots, which is the oldest patience I know, and I feel it also strike the black skin near my feet and simply run away, confused, downhill, into a metal throat, gone before it can soak anything.
They have taught the water to leave too.
The walking ones come out of their beasts and hurry across the heat in that particular way they have, shoulders forward, eyes on some errand I will never see the end of, and not one of them looks up into my crown, though I hold shade over four of their painted stalls and the beasts parked there stay cooler, and their owners, returning, press a palm to the warm shell and sigh, and I like to think that sigh is partly for me.
A boy once cut two letters into me here, before the black skin, when this was pasture. The letters widened as I grew and are a soft grey scar now, higher than his grandchildren would reach. He does not come. His beasts do not come.
The stall where he might have parked stays empty most days, and I hold my shade over it anyway, in case.