SurVision Magazine

Thinking of Klimt's Stoclet Frieze during a Two-Hour Delay

I think I'm on the planet Mars!
—Belgian architect upon touring Palais Stoclet


The tree glows leafless but alive, its spiraling tendrils
frozen as it twines from floor to ceiling of the Palais
dining room. A degree warmer and this would all be

melted and we'd be on our way to school. A degree
colder and the curling branches would not be crazed,
the roads lightly dusted with snow, not slicked with ice.

A degree or two and we'd be happy and warm inside
and out, not shivering before the storm speculating
if forecasts are real or fake, straddling the threshold

in liminal jaundiced light, Expectation's gaze fixed
on Fulfillment's embrace. Life/death heaven/earth
intertwine suspended in space. A fist-sized hole

in the wall would be a hole, an absence of plaster
and paint, not the grief you walk around all day
and at night fall into. You'd be sitting at the table

wielding a Wiener Werkstätte spoon over a bowl
of warm fiddlehead soup, eating your meal in peace
while trees are growing over you instead of cities.
 






Partridge Boswell  lives with his family in Vermont. He is the author of Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Prize). His poems have recently surfaced in The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Plume, The Moth and Forklift, Ohio. Co-founder of Bookstock literary festival and the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, he teaches at Burlington Writers Workshop.