GAS Featured Poet: Tom Montag

 Tom Montag's books of poetry include: Middle Ground; The Big Book of Ben Zen; In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013; The Miles No One Wants; 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.

"The Woman in an Imaginary Painting is a series of more than 350 poems which explore, I suppose, the intersections between imagination and reality, between surface and substance, between hope and loss of hope. The series started as an attempt to understand and record a very clear initial image of the woman sitting as a model which came to me out of the blue of imagination; and it has since spread to the far reaches of a possible life and death on the other side of the surface of that painting."

from
"The Woman in an Imaginary Painting"

She does not have a land-
lord, for she pays no rent.
The room she inhabits

is imagined, an artist's
rendition of the space
around her. The museum

the painting hangs in is
honored to have her there.
People pay to see her.

At night, in the darkness,
she is grateful to have
a place to call her own.

______________________

from

"The Woman in an Imaginary Painting"

She has
only this
morning, this

moment.
The artist
painted

the room to
enclose her.
There is sky

out the small
window.
Hope lasts

a long time
if you've got
nothing else.

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