The music stopped a while ago, which for me is only a change in the small vibrations that travel up through my roots from their lit-up nest. There were many of them earlier, packed warm against the night, and now there are few, and the few have gone slow and honest the way the walking creatures always do when the dark is at its deepest and the birds have not yet started.
Two of them are sitting on the step below my lowest branch, close together, their voices dropped to almost nothing. I have felt this before. Not these two, but this. Every fifty seasons or so a pair of them ends up here at exactly this hour, saying the true thing they could not say while the light and the noise were loud, and each time they believe they are the first to discover that the night gets quiet enough, eventually, to be brave in.
One of them is crying a little. The other is holding a cup that went empty long ago and does not know it. A moth is battering itself against their lit rectangle, and none of them notice the moth, and I forgive them, because they are so busy being alive all at once.
Soon the sky will go grey behind my crown and they will stand, stiff and cold, and scatter to wherever the walking creatures go, and carry this night away inside them like a small seed. In forty years one of them may pass beneath me again, gone silver, slower, and look up, and not quite remember why.
I will remember. I am very good at staying. It is the only thing I have ever learned to do, and I have done it for four hundred springs, and I will be doing it, patiently, in the same patch of ground, long after this porch light burns out for good.