About: Robyn Rowland

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