Elopement

At the first blue wink of dawn, the air faintly glazed with gold, I fled on the bus the discipline of teaching, tenderly severe. As I streaked by hamburger palaces, gas stations to the solace of pine forests, I was a driftwood girl again, burning blue and orange. Once on top the mountain, looking down at the opaline lake, I asked of the rainbow's harp what chord of colors could say what mountains mean. . . . Now, as I lift my brush over Fabriano paper, a gazelle bounds up ten feet away, her large startled eyes, ferny lashes holding crystals of sky: innocence, wildness wide as horizons. Young, tense, amorphous, longing, I trace my line of naiad nakedness back to guiltless groins of trees, sealed sound of hidden springs, to hill, mountain, lake married by rituals of PAINTING, secret, divine. . . .