https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
Poems by Tom Montag
NO CROW
in memory of Chris Halla
No crow today,
friend.
It's cold and clear
and blue,
immense
the way you like it,
and there's
no crow today,
now that you have
left us.
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
Should have known, when
we had to buzz through to
the office, this was
not the motel we
wanted. We took it.
A working girl plied
one side of us all night
and a drug-dealer
the other. We slept
between, the TV on
and blaring, and when
we woke I looked out
to our car and said,
in some amazement,
"We've still got tires."
LOVING YOU
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
You burst like a seed pod.
You sing.
You break into blossom.
Everything is blessed,
everything blessed again.
STONES
Stones
in the hot sun
of an empty field --
a long afternoon --
wishing to be
stars again.
LOSS
Lean of the wind
in trees: loss is
a hawk striking
when it's hungry,
that silence the
last thing we want.
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.
This is Montag's first appearance in Offcourse.