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    Sebastian Schloessingk




       TOURISTS AT THE END


She stepped from the car to course water through
the grape bunch we took to the beach, it plumping
its transparent plastic bag like a brain.
The permanent double lines down the middle
of these dry sinuous coast roads cry wolf.

Soon the cry in the car, regarding family
drink bottle, went up, ‘No salami backwash!’
(targeting me) ... If we shut the night-hot room’s
window we heard the air-conditioning,
lumped on the wall, take the part of the sea. All night

underpants, not all day - kind of a reversal.
And tourists, as the season tapers, are flushed
- depopulating roads, vistas, rooms - first
from the cape, the tip, of a Peloponnese
finger, like stragglers from a museum’s

far end, ten minutes before closing time (by
persistent attendant-shepherds) ... The sea
demonstrates, by turning out tumbling floral
swimtrunks’ sunlit white net pockets in shingly surf
again, a bather’s ultimate poverty.


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