We’re fast approaching the longest night of the year, and David Sloan’s “What Looms” breathes the air of that darkness. This is an ekphrastic or art-inspired poem, written in reaction to a particularly chilly room painted by Andrew Wyeth. I love how this poem hovers over the room’s objects as it considers our mortal limits, as it poses unanswerable questions to the dark.
A graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program, Sloan has two poetry collections, “The Irresistible In-Between” and “A Rising and Other Poems” (both from Deerbrook Editions). After teaching for nearly 50 years, most recently at Maine Coast Waldorf High School in Freeport, he is now semi-retired, content to focus on the joys of grand-parenting, gardening, cycling and more regular writing.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
What Looms
By David Sloan
after the painting “Maine Room,” by Andrew Wyeth
The room hums with emptiness:
unadorned walls, bare floorboards,
the fireplace’s dark mouth, tongueless.
Crosshatched shadows like scarred
light streak a stained mattress.
How cold must a room be for a bed
to be pushed so close to the hearth?
No sheets or pillow; someone’s head
must have rested on that towel. Earth
can be a hard place to live. Barricade
a body against what looms. On the mantel,
helmet or urn? It hardly matters. One protects
in vain; the other holds a candle’s snuffed
remains. Above the bed, shorebirds, sun-lit,
languid, will soon wing into the diagonal.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “What Looms,” copyright © 2020 by David Sloan, was originally published in A Rising and Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions). It appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water
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