Tom Montag


THE OLD MAN IN BOMBAY BEACH

How sad you must be
to live out your life

along the Salton
Sea, to eat the dust

of loneliness, and
then to eat some more.

I'm not saying you
have chosen badly,

though clearly it was
the last choice to make,

here where the wind takes
everything and hope

is a tattered flag.



EVERYTHING ELSE

What is reflected
on one side is

seen on the other.
What is out there

is thereby in here.
You would know that

if you believed
this slanted light.

Everything else
is only

approximate.




Tom Montag is recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013; This Wrecked World; The Miles No One Wants; and Imagination's Place: The Old Poet Poems. His Love Poems is forthcoming from Architrave Press. He has been a featured poet at Atticus Review, Contemporary American Voices, Houseboat, and Basil O'Flaherty Review. Montag has been writing and publishing poetry and creative nonfiction for more than fifty years in a wide variety of little magazines. He was a founding contributing editor for The Pushcart Prize and he blogs at The Middlewesterner. With David Graham he is currently co-editing an anthology of poetry about small town America.
 
 
previous page     contents     next page