One of the small warm ones is still awake beneath me, in the hour the owls own, when even the wind has lain down in the grass to rest.
I know this one. It came in leaf-fall, spread a blanket over my roots, and slept in my shade all summer with a book against its chest. Now it is a season older and it does not sleep. It lies on its back in the dark with a little cold moon held above its face, and it stares into it, and its thumb moves, and moves, and moves, the way a finch's heart beats when I hold it in my branches, too fast, too fast, feeding on something I cannot see.
I have known this hour many times. The walking ones come to me heavy in the small hours, and I have always understood them by the same signs I understand my own kind: whether they are drinking light, whether they are growing. This one is doing neither. The little moon gives no warmth.
It rains a thin light on the face and the face does not open toward it the way a leaf opens; it flinches, and stays, and flinches, and stays. Whatever falls into that thumb never finishes falling. There is no season to it, no turning, only more.
I would tell it what I tell the frightened birds through the long freeze: the dark is not the end of the light, it is the light resting. Stay. Be still. Let the cold hour pass over you and do not chase it.
But it cannot hear me, and by first birdsong it will be gone, back into its hurrying, and I will hold its blanket-shaped memory a little longer than it holds itself.
I will still be here when it learns to sleep, or when it stops coming. Both, I have seen.
Both pass under me like weather.