A diner. Zero tips. Large wages. Priceless location
Antarctica.
cleaning tables, washing pots, swabbing floors
subservient and cheerful
smile wide open. Opinions firmly closed.
Three meals – seven days – 1000 people.
Living was almost free
accommodation and food supplied. No charge.
Extravagant incomes
frugal expenses
instinct would expect gratitude. Not always.
Food was the linguistics of discontent. One couple fluent.
Adventure had not travelled south with them
entitlement made no allowance for geography.
Very married – inseparable.
they moved in a pod of suburban expectation.
To mealtimes they brought the presumptions of an owner
and a critic’s notebook.
At day’s end their table was a court – they minor monarchs
tables to be vacated by 8.oopm did not apply
to attempt enforcement was to invite intimidating temper.
Illusion is a heated balloon
beckoned by current
gravity suspended by artifice.
They were very married
the summers of their lives.
One season. Two hemispheres. Four people.
Orphaned Islands (Un)poetry 