The Woman in an Imaginary Painting, by Tom Montag

from
"The Woman in an Imaginary Painting"

She thinks the hills
of her childhood

call her back. She
is only line

and color, shape,
now, yet somehow

those hills still speak
to her. She has

posed her so long
she doesn't know

how to answer.
She tries. We hear

only silence.
​

**********

You can either
take the mythology

you've been given
or you can

make your own.
Not choosing

is the choice to
refuse yourself.

The painter painted
what he knew.

The woman
in the painting

is not a Rubens.

**********

It ends where
it will end,
this story,

with the gaps
lacunae,
missing text

you expect.
We stand in
different places,

poet,
artist,
the woman

in the painting,
so we know
different truths

and not all
of them can
be spoken.

**********

So many gods
have been lost

to us, she knows --
hearth gods, door-

yard gods, gods
of the shamans

and holy men,
gods of the desert

fathers. Heaven
is no more

permanent to her
than art, and

the gods seem less
eternal than glory.

**********

It's not the meat,
it's the motion,

the wind tells
the woman

in the painting.
The trees move.

The wind
says it again.

Such dreams as
trees have, she

wishes she could.

​

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.