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EBB I

The towel blooms
and withers, blooms
and withers in her hands,
as she wipes the last table
in the restaurant. An abandoned
cocktail grows water from its ice.
The smell & spillage & dirty dishes
linger like silent laughter
after the diners have left. Earlier, staff moved
about sunburned tourists,
order after order, in and out of the swinging
kitchen doors - a rhythm of service
that unsettled. I watch their
movements thicken with fatigue,
and no worksong, not even a pitjay
for them to sing. I want to show them my heart
softened with the moss of sympathy,
like a ruined wall at Pigeon Point.
So soon after. I want them
to hear the chains, the cutlery of empire
that I hear; to show them the deep history
of the tourist pocket. I finish what
is on my plate and think of how, once more,
I must walk the beach alone, gathering shells,
stones, the sea's coral-bones grumbling under
my feet, crunching and growing into a sedimentary
grudge, a gradual bucket of rage. She wipes
the last table - mine; her fingers splayed like roots.
I pick up my dread and walk.