I will tell you. Maybe
You’re leaning in the open
Doorway of some Irish bar,
Watching a single tug
Edge a little clumsily into its
Slip, in a Baltimore twilight;
Maybe we’re driving the bluffs
Of New Mexico one Sunday morning,
Or maybe the coffee’s just
Starting to boil
In the bare kitchen of your rickety
House by the Pacific, as every
Circular pulse of the lighthouse
Slices the dawn fog. Maybe,
At midnight, high on the catwalk
Of the abandoned cannery, we’ll
Watch the bent
Ghost drag his skiff onto the shore.
Turning its keel to face the partial
Moon. Maybe it’s this drifting in time
You’ll no longer imagine, or the body
Of my voice that you hate. Tell me—
Because you remember a woman calling
Out in our sleep? Because nothing’s
Left, if
We’re alone? Tell me. I will tell you.
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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