There is a small warm creature trembling in the arms of a walking one, here in my shade on this bench where so many have sat before, and the walking one is holding it the way I have seen them hold their young: too tightly, as if grip could keep a thing from leaving.
I do not know where they wait to go. I only know they are waiting, which the walking ones are very bad at. This one keeps rising, sitting, rising, its roots finding no purchase, its face turned down toward the small breathing bundle. It strokes the fur again and again, the same motion, the way wind strokes my leaves without meaning to say anything, only unable to stop.
The little creature is old. I know old. Its eyes have the film that comes at the end of many seasons, and it has stopped struggling, and it rests its head against the warm one who carries it, trusting, done with running. This too I have watched a thousand springs: the small quick lives that flare and gutter while I put on one more ring, barely a ring, hardly worth the counting.
The walking one is weeping now, quietly, into fur. It is learning what I learned when I was young and lost my first great limb to ice: that you cannot hold a thing hard enough to keep it. That love does not slow the season.
They will go inside soon. One of them will come back out alone and sit a long while under me, hollowed, before walking off into whatever hurry called them here.
I will still be dropping leaves on this bench when that grief is old, then gone, then forgotten by everyone but the ground. I keep it for them.
I keep all of them.