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RON SMITH
Greece
Mountains, everywhere mountains,
young, soaring, jagged mountains,
where we are so
inconceivably old.
And sea, flashing sea
at every hairpin, glinting blue,
green, aquamarine
beyond the cliffs, lapping
the harbor, loses
its color at your feet, perfect
lens for the black anemone,
chloasma pebbles, quick, silver sardine.
And, oh, the goats! goats
in the road round the bend,
piss-luscious goats
that climb trees at our approach,
ashamed I come as a man,
not the Great God Pan,
and you, still-lovely you,
no nymph. Leathery goatherds
fixing us with that Orthodox stare,
rock ready in the hand behind
the back, goat pens, fieldstone sheds,
corrugated tin
rolling its distant thunder,
every gnarled olive shaking its basket
of cicadas, playing, playing
the hot, incessant, carnal wind. 
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