Up the mountain again three years later,
rocking forward like a burro.
Breathing hard in and out.
Stone, tough earth, loosely tied bales
of wheat all the same color in the sun.
Giant curve of Her shape above me.
Sky dark blue behind that.
Eyes down again picking the way until
finally I stop and deliberately look ahead.
One fig tree. Old dark leaves
and ugly branches easy to break. So aged.
Bark so old I think of weeping. Motionless.
Managing leaves this year but no fruit.
The barrenness of Her place now.
The view all around sky and shining sea.
Her most of all, and the stillness.
The sun so overpowering it is like night
in daytime. Seeing what I live with
only when my eyes close.
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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