January 2020
Tom Montag
tmmontag@centurylink.net
Bio Note:  Tom Montag is most recently the author of Seventy at Seventy: New Poems; The River Will Tell You: Poems Along the Keya Paha is forthcoming in 2020. He has been publishing poetry and creative nonfiction for more than fifty years in a wide variety of little magazines. He teaches at The Mill: A Place for Writers in Appleton, Wisconsin. He was a founding contributing editor for The Pushcart Prize and he blogs at The Middlewesterner. With David Graham he co-edited the recently published anthology Local News: Poetry About Small Towns.

from
The Woman in an Imaginary Painting

______________________

The blue is
as sheer as

curtain. Light
comes through it

to reveal
that which would

stay hidden.
You wonder

that her near-
nakedness

means nothing,
that what light

can touch is
only surface,

that what you
can't enter

you can't be.
______________________

Her hands
stay where

her hands
are. Her

eyes do
not move.

The seep
of color

at her
throat waits

for us
to breathe

in, to
breathe out.

______________________

After all
these years
the light

has not
changed, her
flesh has

not sagged,
the darkness
where it

enters
does not
destroy her.
©2020 Tom Montag
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