May 2016
Poetry is a lonely business, but I have a friend who plays guitar, and when I play bass with him, I find community. My most recent book is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and I've had recent poems in Hummingbird, Atticus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and other literary magazines. I'm honored to serve as managing editor of the Lorine Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. I blog as The Middlewesterner (www.middlewesterner.com), and have put up at least five little poems a week since mid-2008.
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A Slow Evening A slow evening, no wind and the late dying of light. No one speaks of silence, yet silence speaks of the immensity. No one speaks of darkness, which brings us its cool shelter at the end of a hot day. No one speaks of the stars, which will take us to the other side of night. No one speaks of morning, so I will. I will tell of this greatness, our strange earth. Somehow the Sky which opens for us in the morning, which closes when evening shows, somehow the sky always takes us back to where we come from, back to star dust and hard, dark attraction. Alone in the Darkness Only the solitary here in the teeming darkness. Or what seems solitary and what seems teeming. The eye thinks light has meaning. The eye thinks darkness a blank page to be writ on. No one speaks of the heat, the thunder in the distance, the croaking of frogs in the old pond. A breeze curls the night trees' leaves. I sit quietly, wondering how much of this means something. Far away, far, far, away, someone asks the same question. We are brother and sister. We are two yellow stars in some greater constellation. We Are Nothing We are nothing without the grasses that feed those which feed us. We are nothing without the emptiness of the black wind bringing rain. We are nothing without the silence of the night, the shimmer of sky. I am ready to break with everything except this stillness and the stars. Waiting for Spring Where the trees congregate, they wait for spring. The faint blush of green brushing sky. The million singing sorrows of the wind pushing off everything. How long shall we hold on? When will it all bust loose? Will it make us happy? Is happiness what we want? |
©2016 Tom Montag