Amber

The pine bled slowly into centuries, pooling where the bark had split— a wound that learned to harden, grew warm as the sun it swallowed whole. Inside: a moth's wing, a thread of spider-silk, a gnat paused mid-air in its small hunger. The world caught in the act of itself, held at the moment before it changes. To preserve so perfectly is also to arrest. Even light moves through amber differently— thickened, honeyed, soft at its edges, like memory that knows it is memory. We carry our own resins— the way a voice stays lodged in the body, a summer, a particular door, warming for years in the amber of the chest.