Still Life with Invisible Canoe

Levinas asked if we have the right
To be the way I ask my sons
If they’d like to be trees

The way the word tree
Makes them a little animal
Dancing up and down
Like bears in movies

Bears I have to say
Pretend we are children

At a river one of them says
So we sip it pivot in the hallway
Call it a canoe

It is noon in the living room
We are rowing through a blue
That is a feeling mostly

The way drifting greenly
Under real trees
Is a feeling near holy

Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.

Dear C, I dropped

your sentence in hot water.
I talked to the boil. I said Here

is my thumb for you to burn.

Here is the soft heart
of my hand and my arm and

the nape of my wreck.

I said vapor, just take me.
I’m done burning

with these pages. Being invisible
doesn’t mean a person

won’t blister, doesn’t mean

the blisters won’t fill
with pockets of water

or when lanced the rawest flesh

won’t emerge. First the word
then the murky leak

Idra Novey

2014

Parole Hearing

After Mahmoud Darwish

And they searched her voice, heard the lurch of a bus into the deep muck of a field.

And they searched the bus, saw the guts of its vinyl seats.

And they searched the guts, smelled the steel springs rusting.

And they searched the rust, tasted nothing but the tips of their thumbs.

And touching their thumbs to their lips they said well in another three years.

Idra Novey

2011

Poems

Still Life with Invisible Canoe

More by this poet

Nearly

Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.

Parole Hearing

Poems

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Still Life with Invisible Canoe

More by this poet

Nearly

Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.

Parole Hearing

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