Go lift that pane of moonlight from the floor
And tell Nicotiana to stop
Screaming with her perfume.
The Four O’clocks too. They’re drunk with dew.
I gotta date with a hoot owl,
I gotta date with a whoo.
Wait for the bird. By the moon-soaked wall.
By the insect’s hairy legs.
Wait for that green funeral
Of the cricket in a pall
And for the knell that tolls a moth.
A vast robin as well
Of the invisible wound that kills a crow.
Wait till the master of all vermin,
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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