What does he have to give? No less space
than usual opens above him,
outward to the Van Allen Belts and beyond,
but the expanse of his body diminishes
in the wide horizons girdling him;
this isn't the American East Coast—
that cozy scrunch of habitable scarp—
or even the rigged Bavarian stage
where elves carry the tannenbaum
through the wald, a unison of legends.
Here the draft thrills his pores, shimmers through him,
an inward shredding that renders him as stable
as a passel of streamers inside a hurricane.
What sort of gift would this be for the sugarplum
dreamers, hearth-tethered—old belly laugh
x-rayed by the wind: gusto, gusts, scatters
of sand whispering hoarse in the craw?
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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