Two Paintings By Gustav Klimt

Jorie Graham

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. 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 paint 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.