Two of them beneath me since the light was thin and low, and now the sun has swung a full hand's width across the grass and still they have not gone. The young one came early, before dew had lifted, and walked the same six steps back and forth across my roots, wearing a stiff dark skin that did not fit the weather, holding papers it kept looking at as though the paper might change.
It was afraid. I know fear in the walking ones the way I know frost: a tightening, a held breath, a stillness that is not rest.
Then the other came, older, unhurried in the way they use to mean power, and they sat on the bench I have leaned my shade across for longer than either has been alive. And the young one talked. It talked in a voice pitched slightly too high, and it smiled with the whole face at once, and it sat very straight, the way a sapling strains toward a gap in the canopy, reaching for a light it has decided is up there somewhere.
I have seen this a thousand springs. One creature deciding whether another may go somewhere else and do something else and become someone else. All that trembling, to be permitted to leave. I do not understand leaving. I have wanted nothing but this ground, this exact width of sky, since before the bench, before the path, before the grandmothers of these two were seeds.
They shook hands and parted in opposite directions, both walking fast.
The young one will come back one spring, greyer, and sit on the bench, and not remember that it once shook here like a leaf. I will remember. I remember all of them.
It is the only thing I do.