There is a cataract of blood over the dawn;
I know by watching
from the river’s fringes of wild grass
as the bridge cables whine, and the bare
nerves of trees wake to hunger, and the wind
invests us with grand estates of loss; there is
blood unrolling like a stair behind that muslin
battered with cloudblow, sure as there’s a heart
behind this breast. The grass falls slant
as if its tassels brushed a further limit,
and were dispossessed of common thoughts, of ground.
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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