The Cistern Room

Lyrics

Down from the light. Past the gloss of the Drawing Room, not today. Not the chess board frozen mid-game in the Study. I take the back stairs, the worn steps behind the Kitchen. The air cools, thickens. The Furnace Corridor breathes its dry heat to my left, a sleeping dragon. I turn right, away from the chalk outline of the Flood Room door. A memory of a failure this room was built to prevent. Down here, the house forgets its face and remembers its bones.

The iron handle is cold. The air inside is older. Fifty-eight degrees, the smell of stone and wet metal. And there it is. The great grey drum, the belly of the house, riveted steel sweating in the gloom. A kingdom of contained rain. A wooden ladder climbs to a hatch I've never seen opened. A single copper pipe weeps a perfect, slow tear onto the domed roof of the tank.

This is not water. This is pressure given liquid form. A hundred years of rainfall held in trust, in rust. Every molecule a patient promise of dilution. It is the solvent of this house, waiting. The silent engine, the weight that holds the foundation down, the catastrophe in reserve.

The sound of each drop landing has a weight. The weight of a silver coin from 1922, falling through a century to the surface. Down there, in the cold dark, a child's forgotten tin soldier from the war that was supposed to end them all. A single leather glove, its owner a ghost who never lived here. All suspended, not preserved. Dissolving into the solution.

I climb the ladder, my breath fogging. I lift the hatch. And I look down. The surface is black glass. But it doesn't show me the rafters. It shows me this room. Perfectly. A tiny, flawless Cistern Room floating in the water. And in that room, a tinier tank, and on its surface, a reflection of the room again. An infinite regress of containment. The water dreaming only of itself.

It doesn't store water. It stores potential. The potential to become steam. The potential to become ice. The potential to become the flood. To wash clean, to overflow, to reduce all of this to chemistry.