Smoke and Ash

Old men sit on stoops beneath the mountain.
Around them sweetgum trees are red as flame.
My father's trailer backs up almost to the river,
and the green water rolls on rocks and speaks
a dialect I once believed I had forgotten. No one
thinks of Pan these days. The old shepherd's pipes
are mute, the wood-nymphs have retired down
to Florida, and the horns have grown worn and weathered
with old age. My father tells this morning of a soldier
he shot in the neck as he relieved himself in the woods
without a rifle. It is a cautionary tale, I know,
as old as myth, as familiar as Winston cigarettes,
and blue tip matches, as beer bottles thrown out
back screen doors into the woods, as driving
with one hand free to take a swipe. There is a smell
that I remember from my childhood, the smell
of burning leaves that rise up from the dead
as smoke and ash, that float as ember above
where my brother and I stand clutching rakes.
In the meanwhile the Dryads mourn each leaf's loss.
And our mother paces panikon deima in the kitchen.
And Great Pan is off coupling with a goat.

-- Doug Ramspeck