Tom Montag


from The Wishin' Jupiter Poems


The Bitterness

The bitterness
of cedar

in such hard
country, the line

of the falcon
straight to business,

and this wind
without mercy.



Another Coyote Lesson

Always where
goodness is,

sorrow stood.
They won't tell you

more than that.



I Suppose I Could

I suppose I could
leave a poem
in these soft hills

as the old masters
would, knowing
as they did that

all we do is
like wind in grass
and nothing more.



It Is What It Is

It is what it is
without meaning, wind

in the dry grasses,
caressing the only

land it has. Make
of it what you can.



Coyote Says

Coyote says,
Never give up,

and the hawk
agrees.

Out here in this
great wideness,

stubbornness
is what you need,

and patience, grace,
strength, and all

the hard luck you get.

---

HOW CLEAN

How clean
the shine

of the
robin's

bones in
July

sun — skull,
breast, what

once was
wing. Loss

is like
that, bright

in the
outside

moment
before

darkness
takes what

remains.



THE POET

Listen,
he says.

And then
he says

nothing.



THE POEM

I sometimes hope
to find it, or —
if not — to see

its shadow, to
hear the sound of
it passing by.

As the light fades
I still wait for
something, some wind

on the hairs of
my arm like the
touch of a ghost,

some whispering
as if the last
words of dying

stars at the far
end of what's left
when hope is lost.





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 has just come out 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.
 
 
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