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.
Reprinted from What the
Living Do, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Copyright © 1997 by Marie Howe. This weekly column is supported by The
Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2006.
