WATERY FLAMES

And this morning too, after the nights’ rain I watched in the cooling dawn the vapor rise in great white gouts like reaching hands, a dance of cloudy spirals and watery flames above the deeper mist veiling the backdrop of the darker mountains, plunging into abrupt and sinuous relief the formerly two-dimensional dawnscape, scribing ridges, defiles, groves and the taller, ancient trees with the stroke of a mist-brush plied with the grace of a dancer, the dancer that turns in all water, leaps in all sky.