Thursday, April 29, 2010

skit #98: someone else

The country boy reclined against the roots of the wise elm. He chewed the sweetness from the length of the final piece of field straw and gazed distantly. He gazed past the baled hay which accumulated over many months of days of hours of toil, past the very same space that occupied last year's harvest, only to find no familiar distances.

The work year ended. With the rest of the retiring country boys, he swaggered down to the autumn festivals. They celebrated what they had with what they had: pie-eating contests, ferris wheels, games of nominal chance, drag races, indiscretion, blue and red and white ribbons for exemplary domesticates, displays of machismo, saloons, muddy tractors, square dancing, plump lovers, plump wallets, youth under the unending night of the harvest moon. And since the night never ends, there is never another harvest.

The country boy writhes against the trunk of the forgetful elm. He gnashes some bitter grass into pulp and gazes desperately to find something he anticipates upon the horizon. But he can only find himself where he is. The unbaled timothy hay twitches anxiously like whiskers acutely receptive to an obscure present.

As he begins this harvest's work, he watches his fellow laborers thresh hay, fill silos, paint barns maroon, tune carburetors, play their fiddles at sunset, develop adolescent angsts, burn hay, slaughter milkless goats, father illegitimate children, elope to the theatre districts of various cities, forget arithmetics, obsess over dreams, obsess over lovers, drift to adjacent socioeconomic strata, consider ultimate questions of being, indulge, suffer, age, rest, and bale hay. Alongside these country boys, he works. Of all he does, some boys do the same, some do not.

The country boy will scurry among the boughs of the prescient elm. He will dine upon on the clovers, alfalfa, and rye of the known countryside, but never sate himself. He will scout the hummocked countryside from his treetop on the horizon and observe himself upon a former horizon, reclining against the roots of the wise elm, chewing the final field straw, gazing distantly; writhing against the forgetful elm, scurrying atop a prescient elm, inscribing upon the mute elm, deceiving the senile elm, deflowering the coy elm, pledging to the arbitrary elm; gazing towards horizons in all respective manners. In this countryside, every hill has its own horizon, and on each horizon is an elm from which he shall scout, and for each him atop other elms there expand other countrysides and elms and hims the country boy cannot see.

His eyes meet the eyes of another him and of someone else.

It was now spring. The seasons had begun to plant a new crop. He raised the hoe and struck it into the fecund countryside.

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