Someone placed a pale Pan in the fountain
with an old walrus merman laughing at his
shaggy flanks, hoofed feet, two little horns,
precocious libido, hands in a playful prayer.

Pan didn’t die, as Plutarch said, but lost his
maturity; a young boy again, frolicking in
the depths of darkness surging up between
the merman's sneering teeth.

When our ancestors sensed the lumen naturae,
"the light hidden in matter the forces of nature,"
the cosmos was darkened by a chastened sun

                 because it
          revolved in the sky
   just as the other planets do;
and of course the Earth was not
       a planet, but the center
              of the universe.