They gather in the narrow gut of the loud place, the walking ones, pressed shoulder to shoulder along a wall that sweats, waiting for a small door to open and let one of them through at a time. I do not have such doors. When the rain comes I simply drink it through every root at once and pass it out again through leaf and bark on my own slow schedule, and nobody waits their turn to do it.
But I have known waiting. Not this jittery kind, this shifting-foot, arms-crossed, glowing-rectangle kind, but the long wait of a hard March, standing bare and patient while the light lengthens by a hair each dawn. These ones cannot bear even the small waits. One leans her head against the wall the way a sapling leans into a storm it has not yet learned to survive, and her friend holds her upright, murmuring, and I have seen exactly this before: the strong one bearing the tired one, the pair of them, spring after spring, under my branches, though never these two, never quite these.
They are so loud about so little. A girl weeps by the door and is embraced by a stranger, and both of them will forget this by the season's end, will not carry a single ring of it in their wood. That is the sorrow of the quick ones. They meet, they lean together in a bright corridor for the length of one song, and then the door opens and they are gone into the noise and out into the dark and away down all their branching years.
The loud place will fall quiet. The wall will crumble to soil I can reach.
And I will still be drinking the same slow rain, here, holding the ground they stood on.