Still Life with Invisible Canoe by Idra Novey

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 26, 2015   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            Copyright © 2015 by Idra Novey. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “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 is the author Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012).  She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Poetry by Novey   Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012)   "The Parallel Cathedral" by Tom Sleigh "Here and There" by Juan Felipe Herrera "By the Stream" by Paul Laurence Dunbar Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038