Clouds scuffle and clinch in this March sky;
wind presses our turned collars to chin
and Chris casts his line against the grain.
The lure hangs on the peak of a gust;
monofilament esses back and erupts
on the spool into loops and hitches.
A blue gill worries my bait; then,
“Dad, I’m stuck; strings are everywhere.”
I lose my fish and my calm. My son
offers me a labyrinth to unweave.
Numb fingered, I poke at his bristly maze.
I think of how my father looked, black as burning,
and waited through my own lapped coils.
I smooth my face, unkink my forehead
and know I can’t pull these knots undone.
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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