The ridge road takes the ridgespine every way
It turns. It threads the granite venebrae
And old. wind-dwarfed ponderosas that twist
Out of the ungiving, unforgiving ground
Like tips of auger bits drilled through from Hell.
Here, all trees die by lightning soon or late.
This hidden side-trail elk hunters found will fall
To their camp on Sheep Creek, where the creek stops them
They ignite their Colemans, dress the carcasses.
Make drunk display in artificial light.
Years past the road kept going, forded there.
Now the creek has cut and caved the bank.
You have to go on horseback or afoot.
Well, just as well. Afoot or horseback was
The only way to go before the road.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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