KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Tom Montag
LOSS
The girl.
The oneness of her motion
with the horse, fluid, eternal.
The sheen of the horse's mane,
the flowing curls of the girl
moving in wind towards autumn.
You want to bring them back,
the girl, the horse,
but you cannot. They are gone.
It was summer. You were young.
And now, as the grasses have
withered, you've lost them,
the girl, the horse, the mystery
of what you ever wanted.
A WRECKED MORNING
The storm leaves a wrecked
morning. The trees have
been whipped, the clouds blown,
and now I'm driving
with wind against me.
It is enough to have
survived, I suppose,
but I want a softer
light, a lesser wind,
a promise that something
will come of what was
lost to us again.
LATE IN THE DAY
The sad fall of evening.
Wind. Trees push the
darkness, the emptiness
at day's end. I wish
for a thousand years
of laughter. All I hear
is silence. Will it be
enough: this silence, my
turning towards the light?
Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. In 2015 he was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and Contemporary American Voices (August), with other poems at Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Provo Canyon Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere.