Private Ground

First frost, and I walk among the rose-fruit, the marble toes

Of the Greek beauties you brought

Off Europe's relic heap

To sweeten your neck of the New York woods.

Soon each white lady will be boarded up

Against the crackling climate.

All morning, with smoking breath, the handyman

Has been draining the goldfish ponds.

They collapse like lungs, the escaped water

Threading back, filament by filament, to the pure

Platonic table where it lives. The baby carp

Litter the mud like orangepeel.

Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well

I need hardly go out at all.

A superhighway seals me off.

Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars

Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. In here, the grasses

Unload their griefs on my shoes,

The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself.

I bend over this drained basin where the small fish

Flex as the mud freezes.

They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all.

Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake

Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections.