July 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.
THE JOURNEY
for Doug Burk
1.
The journey
you are on
you are on.
One step, then
another.
2.
Open the grey stone.
That which shines
has been there all along.
3.
When you wake
not your eyes
but the whole
world, new.
SUMMER EVENING IN THE YARD
The moon lost to cloud.
Darkness hides its shadow.
All the crickets sing.
In the yard, the night is
a slow warm ocean,
this wide prairie with wind.
We count our blessings here
between where the stars are
and where we want them to be.
EVENING GHOST
Nothing
so much as
this
silence
and shadow.
When
evening
comes, thunder
rolls
distance
between us.
Here
I am,
standing where
I've
chosen.
It's enough
to
be here,
enough to
be
alive
as night drops
down,
enough
to love you
still.
SOMEHOW
Somehow they come.
Sometimes I call them in.
Sometimes I wait.
The light, the wind,
the trees and grasses
all carry them.
I'm full of nothing
and still they come,
now, here, this morning.
FIRE OR ICE
Either fire or ice,
the universe compressed
to nothingness or spread
to some cold, thin blankness.
We don't get to choose.
The die has been cast.
The tick of some small clock
moves us towards the end
of everything. Not even
God gets out alive.
© 2017 Tom Montag
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