The small ones who gather beneath my north side no longer bring their whole voices, only faces bent toward the bright leaves they hold in their palms. There is one who comes each morning, and each morning she folds herself onto the same root that has, over long seasons, worn smooth to the shape of tired backs, and she talks to no one I can see.
Her mouth moves. Then it stops. Then a light on her leaf goes red, and everything about her changes.
This is the part I have watched grow stranger. When the red light shines, she is free. She rolls her eyes at the sky. She says words with her whole body that her body was clearly waiting all morning to say. She flexes her jaw. She rubs the ache from the back of her neck the way a squirrel worries a nut. She is, for those breaths, entirely herself, sagging and honest, breathing my air.
Then the red goes dark, and she straightens, and the pleasant face returns, and the small held-in voice comes back, agreeing with someone far away.
I do not understand where the far-away someone is, or why she keeps her true self folded up and shows it only to the red light and to me. The walking creatures spend so much of their brief warmth pretending to be smoother than they are.
She will stop coming, one spring. They always do. The root will keep her shape a while, then swell and forget it, and some new tired back will find it and think it was carved for them.
I keep them all.
That is the whole of my work, and there is no light on it, red or otherwise, and it never ends.