from "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting"
Tom Montag
Her heart is
a red carnation;
her loneliness,
a grey slag heap.
Light doesn't always
spread to joy.
Hers isn't that
kind of story.
What he wanted
or did not want
was not obvious
to her as she
posed. She knew
nothing of paint.
What was light to
her but the day's
supposed love?
The stillness
tingled in that
instant and she
held it while he
worked. That is
what you do
in the moment
of unknowing,
you simply wait.
Some people want
to bring God in-
to the discussion.
What does pigment
care? Not a bit.
God is not some-
thing that paint can
understand.
In the beginning,
they say, God
separated light
from darkness.
What does that mean
to the woman
in the painting
who lives by
another light
entirely?
Paint, the painter said,
talking to himself.
Paint her. Paint the light
that hums in her.
Paint the silence
at the edge of line,
that at color.
Paint, he said,
the things she
makes me think
I cannot say.
Time is not
God, though
we bow to it
except
the woman
in the painting:
she bows
to nothing.
Tom Montag's books of poetry include: Making Hay & Other Poems; Middle Ground; The Big Book of Ben Zen; In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013; This Wrecked World; The Miles No One Wants; Imagination's Place; Love Poems; and Seventy at Seventy. His poem 'Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain' has been permanently incorporated into the design of the Milwaukee Convention Center. He blogs at The Middlewesterner. With David Graham he recently co-edited Local News: Poetry About Small Towns.