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A Holiday in the Lake Country

I scorn the silliness: climbing `the half-inch
   fissures in the slip'ry rock'
      in the name of poetry's sweet muse.
And yet, paddling through the rain
   in a rented boat on Lake Windermere where
      colored mists lend the hills an air of Faery
and monsters just unseen lurk in the crags,
   one realizes that some beauty remains
      despite respectable efforts
to contain it.
   This is

not because the Lake District is `a picturesque and
   mountainous region in Cumbria with
      many lakes,'
but rather because a certain path which exists only
   in the poetic fancy of
      the Ordnance Survey
nevertheless leads to a heathery mountaintop
   where red-stamped Chernobyl sheep
      baa at peace in the ostracism which keeps them
uneaten, thus demonstrating the need to distinguish always
      between the picture and the picturesque.