Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, March 5th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Howard Nemerov, whose 100th birthday would have been last week. He was born on February 29th, 1920.

Whenever someone's born on February 29th, it's worth pointing it out and remembering them.

But of course, he was also one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century.

He was twice the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and he won the

National Book Award, the Bollinger Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977, or at least

for his collected poems of Howard Nemerov, which came out in 1977. He lived from 1920 to 1991.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Learning the Trees, which came from that

Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, the collected poems of Howard Nemerov.

It goes like this.

Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn the language of the trees.

That's done indoors out of a book, which now you think of it is one of the transformations of a tree.

The words themselves are a delight to learn.

You might be in a foreign land of terms like samara, capsule, droop, lejeum, and poem,

where bark is papery, plated wartier, smooth.

But best of all are the words that shape the leaves,

orbicular, corded, cleft, and renaform. And there venation, palmate, and parallel, and tips, acute,

truncate, oriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now go forth to the forests and the shady trees to see how the chaos of experience answers to catalog and category.

Confusedly.

The leaves of a single tree may differ among themselves more than they do from other species,

so you have to find, all blandly, says the book,

an average leaf. Example. The catalpa in the book sprays out its leaves and horals of three

...