DARK HOLE
It’s always about loss,
though when we are young
we think it’s about love.
There’s an emptiness
in the heart that blood
alone cannot fill.
There’s a black hole
at the center of our
galaxy which pulls us
to some last, great darkness.
That’s not about love at all,
for all we love will be
compressed to nothing
or as near to nothing
as atoms ever get.
You must push through such
losses, though, before
you find what you need.
ANOTHER DEER
DEAD IN THE DITCH
And so you become
one with the universe,
one with this earth,
with the tawny grasses
that cradle you.
One with the vultures
that feast on you.
One with the sky
in which they fly.
One with wind. With
all of us, the huge
roaring greatness of
everything that is,
and was, and will be.
THE DRIVE
Such bright green,
this morning fire,
this consuming
light. We ask
for nothing, this
loveliness enough
to take us home.
SKATING THE FLOYD RIVER
WINTER 1964
Bitter cold. And why be out
in it? With wind an icy
sting above the river. And
snow on everything. With
fingers numbed lacing skates.
Why run the river’s fall towards
the Missouri?
To carve
the only marks the ice would
see that day. To skate free
as a poet would. To do
something that means something
even now, fifty years on.
Tom Montag is the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. He has been a featured poet at Atticus Review (April, 2015), Contemporary American Voices (August, 2015), Houseboat (April, 2016), and Basil O’Flaherty Review (July, 2016), and received Pushcart Prize nominations from Provo Canyon Reviewand Blue Heron Review.
Bindweed Magazine 