Tom Montag


Five poems from The Woman in an Imaginary Painting


These things
which take us —

shape, color,
light, loss —

does she
know them

as we do,
there where

the breeze
seems able

to touch what
touches her?


   ∆


Her delight
would be

white, like
the rush of

nakedness,
her sadness

a rose petal
dark as blood.


   ∆


As if
only

a faint
wash

of color
to linger

there and
there, where

her breasts
must be.


   ∆


Her small
breasts and

the shiver
in her

symmetry,
a glow

which warms
our gaze.

What she
opened

stays.


   ∆


Eternity
is just

this: light,
curve, the

strength of
line, her

knowing
she can

never
go home.




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.
 
 
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