They are released from reason's deep persistence
Or rather from the rote of mass and state,
Yet they will be pre-eminently
Rational in dealings with their visitors.
Here, the more careful holidaymakers say,
'A meal for ten is significantly cheaper
Than at home, though the electricity goes off
At vital moments and it's so unpleasant
To watch the local children tease an octopus.
We bring with us a grammar of concern,
Holding that scorpions should be left to climb
Behind the bedstead, rat-traps not be set
And going topless make us seem more French.'
In the bay a steepled catamaran
Is what a Hedge-Fund Manager declares
Will fit his doctor's rule that he relax.
Infinite clarity seems to stretch
Beyond the ragged mountains—blue so rich
It makes its point that here pollution
Is transparent—builders work in heat
To have new villas ready for next Summer,
Northern agencies forever on the phone—
A vendre, à louer, everything on offer
Even nightmare, earache, family tears.
The portly ferry hardly gets beyond
The window every time you look, and down
The beach-path trot the pouting seventeen-
Year olds whose any natural smile must freeze
To keep their disdain cool. But this is not
The Purgatory foisted by the Old
On their inheritors—instead we might
Assume that islands are the parts we've stripped
From our too-self-contained economies,
Not prisons or Utopias or magic etrands
For fables of a shipwrecked Christ, nor yet
A scientist's concordance of gestalt
But inmost territories of Self, relieved
Of any need of vindication, world
Made world by all the whereabouts of change.
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Poetry from The Literary Review 