August 2017
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.
HOW THE LIGHT
How the light
takes shadow
and lays it
down gently,
as if light
and darkness
aren't different.
Rather, that
this is of
that in an
intimate
way, as though
they're brothers
running bare-
foot in the
tall, wet grass.
IF LIGHT IS
If light is
wave and
particle,
then darkness
is absence,
the distance
between things
which matter.
And silence
must be light,
for it means
something
even when
it's not what
we want.
THE NOTEBOOK
The notebook,
its blank page.
Like that girl
stepping into
the cold air.
Like her scarf
fluttering.
MORNING LIGHT
Fencepost with hawk.
The starkness of morning light.
This, his place
I am passing through.
I worry of tomorrow.
He is simply waiting.
Something moves between us.
One of us lets go.
FOG
An apparition
this morning, the ghost
of night. Against our
blindness. Against the
stubbornness of light.
© 2017 Tom Montag
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