In the wide-angled foreground,
sunlight flattens the straw,
its radiance
durable and inviting.

Deepening
the picture plane,
dark figures
grow smaller down the path.

Beauty and loss

are partners.

I know I will have to leave,
taking nothing with me.

Not the inexplicable colors;
only that they changed me.

Not the lovingly gathered forms;
only that I stepped into
their company

the moment the door
was unlocked and I checked
my coat. We greeted each other
like lost friends--three girls

in gilt frames I could walk right up to--
combing out their long straight hair
as I might have done in boarding school.

Over there a ladder
up against the olive trees, arms reaching for
harvest.

I stand before them--
what I had only seen in books--
knowing
that not even ballerinas
tapping their satin shoes
as they move past the teacher
in his brooding shadow,

not even the teacher as pole star
they circle--or in the other room,
the field raked with light--
promises anything

but paint,
anything but a lifetime of revision

crowding the frame.

- Charlotte Gould Warren