How all things shatter, fall away, and break.
In this time of my great happiness I pass
And repass the gates of the Holy Ghost
Where all men die,
And the bridegroom comes to remember loneliness.
Around the stony saints the old men crawl,
Around and around, and all roads lead to the wall.
The street beyond is all stuffed up with toys,
Where children die, fair girls and boys,
In their narrow cribs devoured by serpents.
A dying widow combs thick yellow hair
And scatters bread crumbs from a kitchen crock.
I see the white birds in her back-street flock.
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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