“Love Poems” by Tom Montag
The Poet
Tom Montag is a middlewestern poet and essayist interested in the relationship between people and place. His poetry includes In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013, The Big Book of Ben Zen, and Middle Ground. His prose includes Curlew: Home, a memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, and The Idea of the Local, essays exploring the relationship of people and place. Montag serves as managing editor of the Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. He has been editor and publisher of a variety of small presses. He and his wife created The Wisconsin Poets Calendar in 1982. He was named a Founding Contributing Editor of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses in 1976. His work is anthologized in The Long Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin through Four Centuries, edited by Jim Stephens. He has been married to Mary, his partner in everything, since 1969.
The Poem
Love Poems
The old barn
loves its aching
darkness.
*
The mourning
dove loves
the O
in sorrow.
*
Rust loves
iron, the rain,
the air.
*
Old pine loves
all that stands
and stays and
won’t give up.
*
What the oaks love
they won’t tell us.
*
The mouse
loves that
the hawk is
sudden.
*
*
Wind loves
the wounded earth
the trembling
grasses.
*
The fields
love the
farmer’s
hope.
*
Evening
loves
the faltering
light.
*
At night
the rippling
water loves
many moons.
***
The Design
Poem letterpress printed by hand on 100lb archival card stock measuring 19.75″ x 2.5″ with 2 folds & packaged in an individual sleeve. Numbered edition of 50 copies.