Two of the walking ones stopped under my south limbs today, in that hot flat clearing they have paved where nothing grows, and one of them held a small bright leaf at arm's length and pointed it at the polished wall, and then studied itself in the wall, and then adjusted the arm that had held the metal up and down all morning, and pointed the leaf again.
It does this many times. It is looking, I think, for proof that it is larger than it was, the way I look each spring at how far my shadow has stretched across the grass.
I have watched this hunger before, though the walking ones change their skins and their machines each generation. They want to see the growing while it happens. That is the part I could tell them, if the wind carried words: you cannot. Growth is not a thing you catch in a bright surface.
It is a thing you notice only afterward, one ring at a time, in a season you were not paying attention to. I did not feel myself become tall enough to shade a road. I only am.
The young one frowned at the wall, unsatisfied, and hurried off toward wherever the walking ones go when they are not here, which is everywhere and always, and I will not see it again for a long while, if ever.
But I have a slower way of holding them. Somewhere in my south flank, under the gray bark, is a name a boy cut with a knife when this clearing was still meadow. He is gone. The knife is rust in the soil at my feet.
The name has healed over and swelled and risen with me, carried up toward the light I am still, this morning, quietly reaching.