Three Poems by Tom Montag

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.”

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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.

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