Fleeting landscape art on a mountain in Arcadia, one sunny Sunday, early spring, 2003: My wife and I are posing over a poem composed of pebbles placed on a “quilt” of slowly melting snow somewhere near the spot where—according to Robert Graves by way of Polybius and Pausanias—Zeus was born, namely Mt. Lykaion (alt 1420m), “where no creature casts a shadow,” at the confluence of the states of Ilia, Arcadia and Messinia and a scant few kilometers from the source of the Neda River, where the newborn god was bathed by his mother, Rhea. Though it was frozen in time by the photographer’s art, “Snow Quilts” melted within a half hour after this photograph was taken, and thus deservedly remains to this day (a rainy one, by the way) my shortest, most evanescent poem.
