Hi Julie,
Fair questions.
Yes, it's a tercet. I may have inadvertently reformated it in copying and pasting.
I tried to put some of what I like about Trakl in my little Trakl poem, under D & A. Let's see if I can put some things in words. First, here are some details that strike me in this poem:
Elis, when the blackbird calls in the dark forest,
this is your downfall.
A thornbush chimes
where your mooning eyes are.
O, how long Elis, are you dead?
The last gold of fallen stars.
It's a kaleidoscopic poem, surreal
avant la lettre and to my mind more interesting than almost any surrealist work I've read. Trakl has a habit of naming birds and trees precisely, as here (not so common in surrealist writers). I love "this is your downfall." The translation isn't great; "are you dead?" is an ugly version of "bist du gestorben?", a question I like a good deal. I can imagine better English throughout. As Rilke writes, the angels cannot tell the living from the dead, and that seems to be the N's case here. The last line I find mythic, in a sort of end of the world-y way.
There's stuff I like less well here, and there's definitely a mental furniture to Trakl that one comes to recognize, but then that's true of Rilke or Baudelaire as well. I'm not claiming that Trakl is another Rilke, but I think he is intermittently splendid, and that's worth knowing in the history of German C20th poetry, which is not broadly known in the US. Trakl died young after six good years of writing and might have produced more; what he did paved the way for, say, Breton and Eluard, and maybe Neruda. Surrealism per se, which he preceded.
Here's a twenty-page pamphlet on Trakl by James Wright and Robert Bly:
https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Trakl.pdf COming out of his complete poems, I think they're right about his silence.
Cheers,
John