The Water Tower Platform

Lyrics

Up from the stop-bath and the fixer's sharp perfume.
Leaving the ghosts to swim in the silver of The Darkroom.
Up past the engine of The Kitchen, where heat changes everything.
Past the hiss of the pilot light, a promise whispered to the kettle.
I take the back stair, the spine of the house.
Not for me the public face, the polished floors.
I need the infrastructure, the plumbing, the honest mechanics of the place.

Second floor. A glance down The Portrait Hall.
Oil pigments, another slow chemical fire, a century of oxidation in still-life.
I feel the pull of The Sick Room, its atmosphere of biological surrender, and turn away.
That is not a transformation I care to witness.
Through the Attic, past the little brother cistern, The Water Tank Room, a mere prelude.
Then the final ladder, cold iron rungs under my hands.
A circle of light above.

And then, the sky. All of it.
Arrival on the roof's high plateau.
And the tower stands. A silent engine against the blue.
Ten thousand gallons of captured cloud, held in stasis.
This isn't a room. It's a battery. A column of potential, waiting for a tap to turn, for gravity to call it home.

I run a hand over the steel plates, warmed by the sun.
The rivets are like braille, spelling the name of the pressure they contain.
The water inside is cold, dense, and absolute.
A solid cylinder of liquid, patient.
Down below, the house is a network of veins, waiting for this heart to beat.
For this solution to flow, to cleanse, to boil, to become steam and rise again.

This is the purest state. H-two-O. The universal solvent.
Here, it remembers the ozone of a thunderstorm, the dust of the high plains it crossed to get here.
The smell of the oxidizing steel is sharp, metallic. And when I breathe it in, it has a flavor. The taste of the hard rain of 1978, full of iron and distance.
I see the tower not as it is, but as a diagram of itself.
A perfect, weightless sphere of water suspended in its core, reflecting an impossibly clear sky.

It holds its charge.
Decades of sunlight have not made it sublimate its purpose.
It waits. A quiet promise of energy.
A chemical equation balanced between the sky and the cellar drain.