winter landscape, with rooks.

Winter landscape, with rooks by Sylvia Plath

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone.
plunges headlong in to that black pond
where,absurd and out of season,a single swan
floats chaste as snow,taunting the clouded mind
which hungers to haul the white reflection down.

The austere sun descends above the fen
an orange cyclops-eye scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin,
feathered dark in thought, i stalk like a rook,
brooding as the winter night comes on.

Last summers reeds are all engraved in ice
as is your image in my eye, dry frost
glazes the window of my hurt, what solace
can be struck from rock to make hearts waste
grow green again? who’d walk in this bleak place?