The Same Floor

All day the light moves. The room stays.

Morning light comes into a room and lays a long shape across the floor.

By afternoon the shape has climbed the wall. It is narrower now, and deeper in color, and it has left the floor entirely. Nothing was moved. The chair sits where it sat. The floor is the same floor. Still, anyone standing in the doorway would say the room has changed.

Some hours the light reaches every corner. Some hours it comes in thin and gray and touches almost nothing. The room takes all of it.

A worry comes in and the whole day takes its color. Gladness comes in and the same day is a different day. The heaviness that filled the morning is thinner by afternoon, and we did nothing to thin it.

The light is real. It warms what it touches. And it is not what the room is made of.

What the room is made of is plainer than that. Floorboards. Four walls that meet. A window wide enough to let everything in.

The light comes in, it crosses, it goes on.

Light has been crossing that room since the first morning. Every hour of it different. And the floor has held all of it.

In welcome,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E