Tonight I hear machines at their dark work in the dark, I understand
the sound they make among the gaps between the trees
to mean: someone is building, something is being built, a man
tilts at his deadline with no moon tonight to show him how. My son
lies sleeping apostrophic in his bed, one month gone by since
I first trimmed his hair, those fine gossamer follicles falling, leaflike,
like the inflection of the one declarative command: change. I take
myself out. Not far-off, not near, the earth-grinders make
their voices heard like drag-harrows behind them. The physical world
contains an inexhaustible supply of metaphor, I tell myself
again; I tell everyone. They listen. They listen like I listen
to the mind’s interrogative, landscape’s imperatives, night’s
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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