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Column 066

The Copper Beech

Intro by Ted Kooser
07.05.2006

Some of the most telling poet­ry being writ­ten in our coun­try today has to do with the small­est and briefest of plea­sures. Here Marie Howe of New York cap­tures a mag­i­cal moment: sit­ting in the shel­ter of a leafy tree with the rain falling all around.

The Copper Beech

Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from What the Living Do, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright © by Marie Howe. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.