Although what glitters

on the trees,

row after perfect row,

is merely

the injustice

of the world,

the chips on the bark of each

beech tree

catching the light, the sum

of these delays

is the beautiful, the human

beautiful,

body of flaws.

The dead

would give anything,

I’m sure,

to step again onto

the leafrot,

into the avenue of mottle shadows,

the speckled,

broken skins. The dead

in their sheer

open parenthesis, what they

wouldn’t give

for something to lean on

that won’t

give way. I think I

would weep

for the moral nature

of this world,

for right and wrong like pools

of shadow

and light you can step in

and out of

crossing this yellow beech forest,

this buchen-wald,

one autumn afternoon, late

in the twentieth

century, in hollow light,

in gaseous light . . .

To receive the light

and return it

and stand in rows, anonymous,

is a sweet secret

even the air wishes

it could unlock.

See how it pokes at them

in little hooks,

the blue air, the yellow trees.

Why be afraid?

They say when Klimt

died suddenly

a painting, still

incomplete,

was found in his studio,

a woman’s body

open at its point of

entry,

rendered in graphic,

pornographic,

detail—something like

a scream

between her legs. Slowly,

feathery,

he had begun to pain

a delicate

garment (his trademark)

over this mouth

of her body. The mouth

of her face

is genteel, bored, feigning a need

for sleep. The fabric

defines the surface,

the story,

so we are drawn to it,

its blues

and yellows glittering

like a stand

of beech trees late

one afternoon

in Germany, in fall.

It is called

Buchenwald, it is

1890. In

the finished painting

the argument

has something to do

with pleasure.