The small one has stood inside falling rain for the length of a birdsong, though there is no cloud, and the rain is warm, and it comes from a single fixed spot high on the wall the way sap runs from a wound but faster, and it steams like the breath of the ground on a frost morning.
I do not understand where the water is kept. It arrives, it leaves, it does not soak into anything or feed a single root. Such waste would ruin me by high summer, and yet the walking one seems restored by it, standing with its face turned up the way my leaves turn, eyes closed, letting the wet run down the way it runs down my bark in a long soft storm.
Then it makes sounds. Not words to anyone. A rising and falling call it does not sing anywhere else, not in the yard, not to the others, only here inside the warm rain where it believes no bird is listening. The house holds the sound the way my hollow holds a nesting call. It seems, for that little while, entirely happy, and entirely alone, and does not know the two are joined.
I have seen this one small. I have seen it climb my low branch and fall and cry and climb again. It is taller now and stays inside more, and the warm rain seems to be the one weather it still stands still in.
The birdsong ends. The rain stops. It goes out into its day and I do not see it again until the light has moved a long way across my roots.
I will hold this patch of ground long after the last of its songs, and I will keep, for whatever it is worth to no one, the memory that it sang.