It could happen again. It will.
But this time the geography will be more final,
more certain of the rain and its echo
of something inexplicably sad:
your face drenched in the almost coastal
light of a long and regrettable seclusion.
Not that the grotto will be missing
its idol, for the poor women
will always go there to pray, but that time
may have masked the entrance with vines.
And yet, even apart we were always inside
a continental silence that seemed gorged
with jungles of pleasure. Certainly
we couldn’t turn from it without pain.
And why take the narrow mountain pass
when the village lights below are guilty
of a paralyzing beauty? Blessings
have never seemed closer
to malevolent spells, or the waves more
insistent on darkly giving. And not sometimes,
but always, we are still surprised
by what the undertow, our benefactor, conjures.
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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