October 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 FORM OF IT
Where they crouch
before they leap;
where they stand
when they land;
all the arabesque
of motion between.
As with poetry
you want beginning,
middle, end.
Process with a
shape. An opening
with hope before
the final disappearance.
START HERE
Start here and draw
something like the sky.
Next come birds. You
can hear their song
but cannot set
it down. Then trees,
their ancient bark
pulling at the sun.
There's something more
you want to say,
still, but cannot.
Those words won't show.
Yet the last line
is not the last
line. There's always
one more. Always
something else.
THE HALF-LIFE
The half-life
of loveliness
in a gleamed
flash of sunset.
We hold it so
it might stay.
It won't. Only
this cold rain
on the empty
lake. Only
the lost, hoping
to find home.
Only one breath,
the breath of God.
THE DARKNESS
Now an owl, a great, grey
thing with wings, lifts and lets
the air be air, be silence;
then the cry of some small
creature carries, farther
than you can imagine,
farther than the stars whose
light will never reach us.
IMAGE, NOT
imagination:
the red-tail
drops
all meaning.
© 2017 Tom Montag
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