Light leaping up like laughter from three surfaces, breaking
Out of those lost ponds into the shining air, is a blessing.
Have I a right to demand their presence?
I must deserve such benefits, such pools of water, such frail
Surfaces of delight, whether remembered by
Mistake, or really received, deserved not by laboring
Merely, but by a readiness of the heart to accept such fine
Gifts of phenomena. To what have I been entitled?
A loan of three ponds, perhaps. A gift of light over snow
In the glare of December sun. A solemn launch, gliding
Among rowboats. Discoveries of love on dark October
Benches beneath smashed lamppost globes.
-To a glimpse more precious, even, than those of goldenmost towers.
When, once at hide-and-seek, by a path that ran below
The crown of hill engemmed with ponds that I'd not found
Out for myself yet, I pushed through a hedge of broken
Privet and fell headlong against the concrete and oaken
Bench, where a tall fat man I now guess was thirty-five
Or thereabouts, was stretched, brooding, with his whole
Length extended along the bench, his head supported
Not with his palm, along the jaw,
But on his wrist and the back of his hand, his fingertips
Continuing past his chin; and he lay on his left side
And watched me as I rubbed my scraped brow with my mitten.
And from where I stood, I read on his face the kind of smile,
Awkward, a little strained, that one can often find
In mirrors; and as the wind blew dead leaves on the path
Tangling his long, untidy hair, I turned, and behind me
He lay there motionless. I felt him bless me. I ran
Away from the vision behind my back.
What did he see, that lying man? A boy, running
Down along an airless path between scrubby trees?
Three silent children playing in a ring, then? Something
Utterly different, rising behind his eyesight weeks
Later and then forever? For whatever he had received,
Oh let him have been thankful, even as I am now:
It is a garden we fall from; a city, somehow, we feel
That we have been promised, though not a city built to surround
A park, a remembered past like ours;
