February 2018
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.
UNCERTAIN WIND
A red-tail hawk
steadies itself.
Uncertain wind.
We don't know which
story to tell
today. That we
will let go of
promises. That
trees will lose their
leaves. That when
the darkness comes,
that hawk will not.
WAITING THE GREEN SHINE
The birds I feed look more
and more like squirrels.
The sky has been tending
towards grey all morning.
While summer is promised,
it feels like spring. All things
are only what they are.
I don't know what to want
anymore and I can't see
what patience gains me.
OLD MAN
The larger movement
outlined ahead
only now is lost
as light lies down
with darkness and
memory flutters
like an autumn
moth. Old man,
everything you plan
ends with waiting
for one more word,
the perfect one.
THE SADNESS OF HAPPINESS
The sadness of happiness
is the absence of sadness.
That slow moan was the only
song I knew. So now what
to sing of, when the stranger
angel in my nature knows
between kiss and climax
there is always this darkness.
WALKING THE TRACKS ON A WARM DECEMBER DAY
Of course, the
sky. Birds still
in the trees.
Open water.
And questions.
Train in the
distance or
not? Where does
one step to
avoid what
he’s chosen?
When does he
accept what
he has got?
Why does he
go the back
way home? Who
else knows we
all must die?
© 2018 Tom Montag
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