Sometimes in the evening I see
coming toward me, from a distance,
a kind of blossom: huge, blue, nodding
against this flat continent, taking
the fields away, and changing
irreversibly as the leaves
go by into that visible surface,
the dark, which takes me up,
again, still unprepared among
the lamplight of this year’s
perpetual turn. As if my
saying so made any difference,
this is, I assume you know, still
too close to you. Which doesn’t
matter. And yet, if it were
anything else, like an elliptical
conversation, or a question of a loon
lifting off an empty tree,
or the room simply gathering
shadows in its usual fashion
and dispersing the dull light
—it would have meant the same.
As though I were standing,
inevitably, at the edge of a secret
place that begins overflowing
its stones, in a way I could only
describe. But you can almost
hear me say it, this is the room
where I live. That same weakness.
Which tells you something
about yourself. And before I sleep.
as always, I raise myself up
on one elbow and pour water
into a glass, and the dozen acacias
are bleeding on the pond again, which
I can see from the window, the pond
that so often thinks of itself
in human terms, as you’ll remember,
on nights like these—or as a fire
around which sullen, disgruntled men
have gathered now that even the moon
has come out and confessed:
but I want to love you with both my hands.
Now that the landscape, like an
unwritten page, is occupied with so many
other details of pain—like the smoke,
coiling there so gracelessly,
the black smoke no one will talk about.
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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