October 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.
Grey Evening in Oshkosh
Even the loneliness
is lonely. You could go
home from here, yet sadness
would go with you. Rain on
the water. The sorrow-
speckled river. The grey
light fading. Stand alone
above all this. Let it take
what you have left to give.
Like the River
Every day, sadness
like the glint of
sun off water —
your lingering pain.
Like the river
you must learn to
go away, to flow,
and yet remain.
Lone Cottonwood
clawing the sky
on the open plain
as if anguish
knows us by its name.
Settled light,
the first hundred
stars of evening.
So far the sky,
so near the trees
brushed with wind.
Darkness comes,
loneliness and sorrow
and, even now,
the body's hungers.
About Death
So night comes and we think
we're flying into darkness
with this dying of the light.
We think death is somewhere
we're going, not something we
already are. Can't you hear them
calling, my friends, the stars?
Come play with us, they seem
to say. Listen: Come play.
©2016 Tom Montag
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF