It's a morning of snow and crows storming the bare treetops
As if they invade the eves of a burned-out cathedral.
Where are the children? A ludicrous posture of mourning
Haunts me and makes me stupid. Age makes me stupid.
Sadness.
The loss is not even mine. It's envy or lonesomeness
Or the recurring tricks of failure, like the left shoulder
That gave out and spilled coffee on me and left me staring
Around my kitchen, saying not, "Stupid, what's wrong
with you?"
But, "Where are the children?" as if the crows carried
them off.
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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