Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter.

The speaker invites a companion into a quiet, contemplative stillness beneath trees imagined as innocent of human anxieties. By attributing to them only the “thought” of seasonal change—leaves withering in autumn, branches like “stiff fingers” in winter—the line contrasts nature’s unselfconscious cycles with the weightier, self-tormenting reflections of human consciousness. The request to “sit still” suggests a desire to suspend striving and interpretation, to adopt (even briefly) the trees’ unambitious acceptance of time. The image is both consoling and melancholic: consolation in nature’s simplicity, melancholy in the inevitability of passing seasons and the cold clarity of winter.