This early the garden’s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names—
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese—each particular
ridiculous to be.
Source: Poetry (November 2010).
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This poem originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Poetry magazine
Nate Klug was born in Minnesota, grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and earned a BA in English at the University of Chicago. In 2010 he was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation.
Klug is a Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School and a candidate for ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Christian Century, Literary Imagination, Poetry, the Yale . . .
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