They came in the warm season, the loud ones, more of them than my roots have counted in any single evening, and near a stage that shook the air they gathered so densely that from up in my crown they looked like one animal shivering. Then the animal broke apart.
They ran at each other. They fell and were lifted, fell and were lifted, a churning the way starlings churn before a storm, though starlings turn to save themselves and these ones turned toward the harm on purpose, laughing, mouths open, arms out.
I have felt this before, in a slower key. Wind does it to me: shoves the whole crown one way until the trunk groans against itself, and the groan is not pain exactly, it is the feeling of being pushed and still holding. Perhaps that is what they want, the small ones.
To be pushed hard by something bigger than themselves and discover they are still standing. They cannot lean on each other for long, being loose at the root, so they must throw their weight into one another all at once and catch it back, over and over, faster than any season, done before the dew comes.
One of them staggered out from the edge and put both hands flat against my bark, breathing, sweat-dark, grinning at nothing, and stayed that way a while, steadying on me the way a wet young branch steadies as the wind passes. Then he was gone back in.
They will scatter before the leaves turn. The stage will come down in a night. But the ground where they stamped so hard is my ground, and it will drink the trampling and forget it by spring, and I will still be here holding the same patch of sky, remembering the boy who leaned.