Introduce the boat to the water.
The boat's a house and won't go anywhere.

The water abandons the boat at the top of the water, at water level.
The water also abandons itself at the top of itself.

Then my son, and his mouth-corners
out and up; he dazzles.
He came to me to eat.

Then the water abandoned itself back toward the sea;
left the boat in a muck

and rocked and rummaged it up again, in some hours;
the river was tidal.

The water abandoned its muck in a line on the boat
and borrowed its paint.

The milk abandons me but I don't want it. He may as well have it.
The boat could do nothing to the water; it dents the water.

The water flees and recovers, and plays with the hole in itself. It's brilliant.

The inverse of the hole was a house.

The boat was called Induce. It made some people
up and down, up and down, and a hole in the water.

Copyright (text and photographs) © Catherine Wagner, 2003.

Catherine Wagner’s second book, Macular Hole, is forthcoming from Fence Books, New York in 2004. Fence also published her previous collection Miss America in 2001. Her poems are online at www.GutCult.com, www.Slope.org, and the DC Poetry Anthology She lives in Boise, Idaho. The text of the poem Induce, above, is the revised version, current as of the end of December 2003. The original version can still be found in the PDF version of issue 57, which preserves the original printed version of the magazine (albeit with corrections of stray typos in that version).