VISIONS FROM THE RAMBLE
Gracefully touching hands, the three lost, tiny pools
Laughed across open lips of rock between their basins,
Fringed by the dancing late spring grass that barely moved
To the wind's secret music, to the soft, semi-brave
Flashing of sparrows from the glistening mica phrases
Of the gray margins. Gracing all this, the laughter, the sound of
Laughter from where the waters poured from each pool's face
Away toward its sisters, coursed always gently downward,
Then finally vanishing underground.
From that high, quiet summit, somewhere above the tired,
Parched slope of Burns's Lawn, no voices and no dancing
Of water came; not even in winter, when the thin, bright
Ice snapped like shining foil underfoot, and a trickle chattered,
Almost as if remembered only from louder splashings;
Almost as if in dream, when the wind's secret silence
Flares up as it did in Avignon when the huge sad swans
Imponded in the high park, were frozen somehow, wildly,
Last winter in the unheard-of ice.
Even in winter, when that slope was always called
Eagle Hill, for the flexible flights of children
Shouting down towards the drive, when bare bushes enforced
No secrecy at the top of the hill, the pools still hid.
Unbidden, once, I crept with my sled through drifts and thickets
And saw the three asleep, still holding hands beneath
The bluish ice. Imprisoned? No more than my eyes, which, stinging
With wind and tears of glare, I lidded down, relieved
For a dark minute of what I'd seen.
The Ramble is the section of Central Park south of the Seventy-ninth Street
transverse and north and east of the Lake. From parts of
it,
none of the surround–
ing city is visible.
