If future archaeologists examine the turquoise tiles on our kitchen floor like excavated Roman villas, the tesserae of our hectic days, fragments from broken plates, glasses, promises, shall reveal only ambiguity, not inner secrets. Scarabs of my unprimed paint on our garden office peel, colour opulent when new, now haggard, jasmine I planted rampant, invasive. That leadlight door opens to an odour of mothballs, silverfish inherit beloved books, the loft a cobwebbed reliquiae, tendrils of jasmine reaching inside.
The sound of your car purled into the fog, I stacked our dishes, plugged the sink, ran hot water, squirted detergent. I sponged cutlery, crockery, in my usual order so the water lasted clean for as long as possible.
I scratch your donkeys’ long lovely faces. Old songs familiarity unmoor me, as does the ladder I no longer climb to clean that high window I had put in, better now that rosellas can see their flight path obstruction.
On my side of the bed reading by the Tiffany lamp, shadow cast over dusty photos, Hopper’s haunting prints, a branch clawing the roof, I bolster myself using that hand-made damask cushion depicting different dances, both bought in our junk sale days. Who would have imagined their survival from collected, broken, and lost bric-a-brac since we last danced? I love the tango’s flesh and muscle, but her once vivid red dress has faded to dusky rose, sensual thigh split abraded by constant wear.
My slippery architectural style that tested your patience redundant, I still balance my plate against the cup to drain, pull the plug, dry and put away, wipe the draining-board. Evenings drag yet seasons seem to have whizzed by.
Wearing a sloven’s comfort clothes, listening to our old house creak, I stoop for a red rubber band of yours I keep in that broad earthenware bowl with odds and ends I can’t throw out below the clock that runs too fast, tilting time askew, off-centre like a sad drunk despite my obsessive corrections. I bump into and drop things, abrasions, blood trails, common.
Tango man’s look suggests his beat shall never still, brow dark as the sky when the air smells of storms. The heart’s scald, its sob for the past’s rule of no return, won’t be found by puzzling archaeologists, time, and memory, not contiguous passengers. The pine panelling I chose for our bedroom has finally mellowed, honey-coloured, the way you hoped it would. I never did complete the task of sealing it.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.