THE ROOM
There is a room where it is summer all the time, but it is not this room.
The room where it is summer all the time is a room full of windows where it is always summer outside, but it is never summer inside the room.
There are no rooms where it is winter all the time, or spring all the time, or autumn all the time, or between seasons all the time.
These seasons do not need to live in a locked box in the heart of a statue whose skin is exposed to the slow wreckage of the weather.
The light inside a stone, intricately chiseled into the shape of a statue, is the same light that was placed inside the stone before someone tried to carve the light out of it.
It’s the same as when the soul of a tree recedes into itself for the winter. It enters its lifelong summer underground, where it really is always summer.
A coffin is a small room. It is always seasonless inside a coffin, despite the fact that all coffins are trees locked in a deep sleep.
What season does it become when the roots of a tree burst through the wood of a coffin to turn its body’s veins into roots?
To be able to picture this, we have to picture a light shining in absolute blackness. We must be that light.
Nothing like either of us will happen again.
Robin Arble is a poet from the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Door Is A Jar, Anti-Heroin Chic, Pøst-, and Brazos River Review, among others. They study literature and creative writing at Hampshire College.