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 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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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 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.