Devon Pan

Devon Pan

A boy with goats,
flute pressed to his lips,
breath spilling into wood—
a ribbon of sound
trembling like reeds in a river.

The goats shuffle,
a comic chorus,
yet their eyes, like his,
turn toward the woman on wheels,
her hair a banner in the salt wind.
Not Syrinx fleeing Arcadia,
but a Devon cyclist—
swift, untouchable—
her passage stirring
the same old hunger.

Pan once chased,
and Syrinx became music.
Here, the chase is only eyes:
a turning of heads,
a melody half‑formed
in the boy’s chest.

Wordsworth might have called him
“a simple child of nature,”
innocence grazing in the fields—
yet already the heart quickens,
already the world
is more than pasture.

Keats would have lingered
on the “unheard melodies” of the flute,
the sweetness of desire
that never quite arrives,
while Shelley might have named
the wind itself a piper,
scattering notes
across the restless sea.

And so the scene holds:
a boy, a flute,
goats nodding in rhythm,
a woman vanishing down the trail—
all of it ordinary,
all of it myth.

For in every gaze
that follows beauty,
in every breath
that makes music,
the old story repeats:
Pan reaching,
Syrinx escaping,
life itself singing
in the space between.

.