Gustav Klimt is known for his portraits more than his landscapes. That said, the The Park (1906) gives us a strange juxtaposition of blue, green, and yellow dots, a pointillism (which influences the nine-tenths of this oil painting made up of foliage) and representation (which offers the tree trunks and grass at the bottom). Without the tree trunks, The Park would be almost entirely abstract.

Klimt abandons the pointillist effect in painting the tree trunks and grass. The moss on the thickest trunk is so finely detailed and visceral that I began to wonder if that moss was the beginning of the painting.

All of his landscapes were begun in the open air, though many were finished in the studio. It seems fair to call these landscapes plein air paintings.

Poet David St. John described a postcard of this painting as “an example of cliche so profuse it touched my heart”.

In “The Park"," St. John offers an ekphrasis of Klimt’s painting—one that refuses the separation of landscape and portrait. Like many of us, he reads his affective landscape into the painting. He figurates.

Each line begins in the majuscule: there is a formal presence that undercuts itself by resorting to ampersands. How do you capitalize an ampersand? What is the majuscule of a shortcut?

We are reminded that the poet is looking at the postcard rather than the painting. I don’t see St. John’s “solitary figure”?

The poet keeps this image on his wall: he preserves it.

Moyra Davey has written about single images and fragments, how they possess  "miniaturization", the "possibility of possessing the thing." Images locked to the wall in her room form a  "psychic landscape".

Imago lucis opera expressa: Roland Barthes uses this Latin expression to designate an image expressed by the action of light, which is how he defines photography. And Susan Sontag called a photo "a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask...the registering of an emanation."

Although there is no photo in St. John’s poem, I can’t help reading a photo image into the speaker’s view of Klimt’s The Park. It is as if the emanating spirit of a moment he recollects is there, in that painting. A photo that wasn’t taken. A postcard that mines the gap.

Apropos of nothing, my favorite park piece by Klimt is The Park at Schönbrunn Palace (1916). The reflection is staggering.