Calmly clouded Tuesday.
The chateau is closed.
Nothing glitters.
We walk up the steps
The water usually falls down.
We circle the circular pool.
We picnic illegally with our forbidden charcuterie
Behind a hedge, and hide the package there
From tonight's rain and tomorrow's glitter.
I do not feel like Empress Someone slumming.
I do not feel like a maid on holiday.
I do not feel like Alice or like Chloe.
Content, we amble,
Pausing above a huge tiered lawn gone almost to meadow,
Beside a shallow canal which any other day
Might have looked cosmic.
Its two straight lines leading half a mile to nowhere,
Contained by two straight lines of poplars
Also leading nowhere—
Or everywhere, perhaps, when the sun is out.
We sit between the poplars and a bank
Watching the gray-brown surface reflect nothing,
Receive no shadows,
Allow the few brown carp pacing its length
To be seen whenever we can see them.
Halfway between Arcturus and a ditch,
Nothing vast and nothing vile,
Just a kilometer of quiet water by which to sit.
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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