First frost, and I walk among the rose-fruit, the marble toes <br />Of the Greek beauties you brought <br />Off Europe's relic heap <br />To sweeten your neck of the New York woods. <br />Soon each white lady will be boarded up <br />Against the crackling climate. <br /> <br />All morning, with smoking breath, the handyman <br />Has been draining the goldfish ponds. <br />They collapse like lungs, the escaped water <br />Threading back, filament by filament, to the pure <br />Platonic table where it lives. The baby carp <br />Litter the mud like orangepeel. <br /> <br />Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well <br />I need hardly go out at all. <br />A superhighway seals me off. <br />Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars <br />Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. In here, the grasses <br />Unload their griefs on my shoes, <br /> <br />The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself. <br />I bend over this drained basin where the small fish <br />Flex as the mud freezes. <br />They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all. <br />Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake <br />Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/private-ground/
