Field skeletons

If a man stands in a field for long enough, he might become one of its skeletons.
As his shadow grows long in the afternoon, he may find that his feet have fixed to the tilled earth below him and that fate has made him part of that idyll forever.
That is a dream to have anyway, this dream to become a part of the field. Perhaps when I die someone will find my bones and scatter them there, bury them among the compacted clods and roots, plant them kindly.
A field holds many skeletons and not all of them below its green-brown canvas. From the dead sheathes of yesterday’s harvest to the slender sapling that yearns to grow so thickly and quickly towards the sun, all are skeletal beings. Spectral before you, transitory, without flesh, promising either life or death... but who knows which side will win through?
The very nature of the field is a slowly convolving routine; the ageless schema of death to life to death and life again. Nature is a wonderful thing of permanent resurrection.
But where does man fit into the field? Is man like this long dead machine, left to rust on the sidelines? Set there for eternity to watch its successor, the better machine, doing its role, doing everything better, while the new grass grows fresh and long all around it? What torment, it must feel.
No, I think man has a place closer to the field. It’s almost kin, to me, that aching pasture, that threshed turf, and we sit somewhere between that rusting carcass and the steady green grass. Though it’s hard to say just where.
I hope I’ll find out, some day, when the sun casts its long fingers across the shadow of my life and leaves me standing there, naked before the winter, still and skeletal in the midst of the great field.

The Waterfall

He came to the waterfall early on a summer’s morning. Rainclouds dulled the sky and water trickled down the rocks like spilt milk.
Somewhere, above him, a torrent was building and he could hear it roaring in his head. He looked up slowly as the cracks started to sound.
It was as if the very cliff face were being torn asunder by old gods, awaking from untimely slumber.
And then sharp sheets of lightning flickered with the booming rolling waves of the thunder, and Samuel knew the rain would come soon.
He held up his hands, rubbing them in ecstatic delight, before: one, two, seven, fifteen drops of rain dripped onto his dry hands and Samuel knew the land would know life again.
Soon the drops teemed in their thousands, teemed like so many tiny hatchlings sprawling upon the stones, the grass, the pool. Even the trees and the vertical cliffs tasted it; the rare flavour of vitality.
Samuel dropped down onto the rocks before him and began to feel the water pooling about his knees. He cried and screamed many thank-yous to the sky and the thunder answered him with a deep groan.
The water danced down and the waterfall gushed to life and the trees seemed to start to grow and turn green again.
And so Samuel took a stone to his head at the foot of the waterfall, sacrificing himself as is the want of the thunder and of the water and of the green of life.