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      December 23, 2021This RoomDevon Balwit, Shannon Jackson

      Image: “Easy Like Sunday Morning” by Shannon Jackson. “This Room” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2021, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      He asks to make love, and because he asks, I do,
      though my aging desire has turned instead to
       
      the bedside table, to the London Review
      of Books, to the now sexier pursuit
       
      of end rhymes and long walks through
      leaf-blaze. I’d never thought it true
       
      that the fathomless lust of thirty-two
      could silt and still. Now, I must brew
       
      it up if I want it. It’s not you,
      I hasten to tell him, unclewing
       
      his anxiety and letting the breeze undo
      it. How much earnest whispering this room
       
      has witnessed—plans to make new
      life, plans to help failing parents move
       
      to their last dependency, rue
      at lost chances, the shy wooing
       
      of new ones—this, too,
      what lovers do between the sheets. The view
       
      from the window doesn’t get old, the moon,
      and morning peeking in, the bed imbued
       
      with both solemnity and mirth, the glue
      that binds us, like two ancient, tangled yews.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Shannon Jackson

      “It was both thrilling and fascinating, and felt a great privilege indeed, to read through the poems inspired by my photograph. Each one impacted me for different reasons, but I chose ‘This Room’ for its personal resonance. Photography is most often a strictly felt experience for me—and usually what moves me to click the shutter is seeing, or feeling, something extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary moment. I felt this poem did much the same for me. Using the simple imagery and moments of a life, as well as the narrator’s personal confessions and musings, the poet speaks to the kind of love that is perhaps only possible at a certain age and stage of life, but which, given such duration, contains a multitude of layers and complexities. It left me pondering the extraordinariness in what might seem an otherwise ordinary love and life together.”

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