April 18: Still Life with Invisible Canoe
Martha
Still Life with Invisible Canoe
Idra Novey
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
----
Also by Idra Novey: Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed
Suck the marrow out of life with poetry from:
2025: I want a president, Zoe Leonard
2024: Fourteen, Marie Howe
2023: I wanted to be surprised., Jane Hirshfield
2022: Short Talk on Waterproofing, Anne Carson
2021: Cindy Comes To Hear Me Read, Jill McDonough
2020: from This Magic Moment, David Kirby
2019: Poem In Which I Become Wolverine, José Olivarez
2018: In the Beginning God Said Light, Mary Szybist
2017: from Contradictions: Tracking Poems, Adrienne Rich
2016: I Said Yes but I Meant No, Dean Young
2015: Cardinal Cardinal, Stephen Dunn
2014: Ezra Pound’s Proposition, Robert Hass
2013: Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener, Bob Hicok
2012: Not Getting Closer, Jack Gilbert
2011: Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, Dan Pagis
2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton
2009: It’s This Way, Nazim Hikmet
2008: The Problem With Skin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
2007: Serenade, Terrance Hayes
2006: The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin
2005: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath