by: Tom Montag
Tom Montag’s poetry fills the moment of reading with a deep and resonant sense of personal and perceptual loss. Nature can surely provide solace, but its never-ending cycles exclude us, pointing to our fast approaching event horizon: “Yet the earth// keeps breathing.”
TURNING
Deer carcass
picked
nearly clean.
Slight stink
on the wind.
Yet the earth
keeps breathing.
WHEEL
Time is no
arrow
but a wheel.
This moment
shall come again
like water down
the mountain
to river and
ocean, to sky
and back. Each
moment returns.
All that was
will be.
You may not
live to see it.
SOMETHING IS
Something is attracting
the Great Attractor.
We don’t know what.
How can we? We are
flying through space at
1.3 million m.p.h.
towards the end of
everything and still
we walk around as if
there’s nothing to it,
this believing in free
will, this believing
we are immortal.
Tom Montag is the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013, This Wrecked World, and The Miles No One Wants. He has been a featured poet at Atticus Review, Contemporary American Voices, Houseboat, and Basil O’Flaherty Review, and received Pushcart Prize nominations from Provo Canyon Review, Blue Heron Review, and The Lake. With David Graham, he is editing an anthology of poetry about small town America.
