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
Copyright © 2015 by Idra Novey. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“As a child, I played in the woods and pretended they were a city. Now, I sit in my hot apartment with my children and pretend we are in the woods. Meanwhile, the birch and maple trees I once played beneath are disappearing as the planet gets warmer. The more I thought about those vanishing trees the shorter this poem became.”
—Idra Novey
Idra Novey
Idra Novey is the author of several novels and poetry collections, including Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012), selected for the National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith, and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008).