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 Soon & Wholly (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012), selected for the National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith.