Reservoirs
In this house the inkwell of my first
twenty years. All memories written out,
I thought. Dark corners cleaned of grime.
Yet, still a frenzy of scrubbing when I came.
Back to care for my father five decades on
I wash net curtains in the laundry.
Grey, they shed their dust, the years
my mother worked under them.
Like tulle petticoats they gather at the
window, frilly with daisies and so wide,
foot after foot for such a small pane.
Long as a wedding veil, and now as white.
Sweeping aside today, scratching around
in the past, finger-tips sting. I inhabit now
the room built-on for my grandmother.
On my knees, I try steel wool on its ensuite tiles.
Small pink squares, larger ones dove-blue,
oblongs speckled bird-egg white. My eyes
would fix on them at fifteen, helping her on
the toilet, her tongue, feet hobbled by Parkinson’s.
In the main bathroom our loo was in the corner
opposite the large mid-grey bath with a magic
maroon porcelain fish-head that gushed water.
Floor tiles were small hexagons in grey, pink
and blue. Mesmerised, I loved their complexity,
sat for hours trying to decode some pattern
hidden there that I never unfurled. Strange
that I remember bathroom floors so clearly.
Sea-blue and timber walls, a front bedroom was mine.
Gone, the deeper blue flattened scallop of glass-shade
close to the high ceiling, its etched fifties patterns
making clear-ways in swirls. I could just make out
my reflected outline moving below between clarity
and the sky-like otherness above, shadows around.
I don’t sleep there now, beside the wardrobe
she broke open for my secrets, my mother.
I could hear the train in the valley steaming to Kiama,
cows mooing on the west side, green with dairy farms,
buried now under a tsunami of Lego-land housing.
On the east side, the warm Pacific we swam daily.
Now so much salted history is damned in me.
I am the tear-bottle filled with myth,
a vessel reservoired with recollection.
Soon, stopper out, all drops will become vapour
— Robyn Rowland
