The blue air, the yellow trees

 To view the album 'Autumn Trees' click here.

(The trees in the photographs are Poplar not the Beech trees mentioned in the poem below. That brings me to another favourite autumn painting–  Autumn Effect at Argenteuil (1873) by Claude Monet.)

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 mottled 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.

Excerpt from "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt", a poem by Jorie Graham. The painting being referred to in this part of the poem is Klimt's Buchenwald (Beech Forest).