persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,
excavating tunnels, drilling silences,
insisting, running under my pillow,
brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids
with another, intangible skin made of air,
its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes
migrate through the provinces of my body,
it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,
slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,
climbs the nape of my neck,
turns and turns in my skull,
wanders across the terrace of my forehead,
conjures visions, scatters them,
erases my thoughts one by one
with hands of unwetting water,
it evaporates them,
black surge, tide of pulse-beats,
murmur of water groping forward
repeating the same meaningless syllable,
I hear its sleepwalking delirium
losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,
it comes back, drifts off, comes back,
endlessly flings itself
off the edges of my cliffs,
and I don't stop falling
and I fall
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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