come in every size and shape,
wiry and weighty,
jogging and mincing, plodding and sprinting,
in all colors and kinds,
female and male, younger and older,
all garbs and gear, footwear and headbands,
gaits and speeds, grimaces and grins,
in packs and threes and twos and ones,
chatting away or bound into ourselves
we go
round
and round
crunching buff-gray pebbles, scattering splattered linden leaves,
running through autumn into winter light, barely
sighting Acis and Galatea surprised
naked by Polyphemus in luscious marble
at the Medici Fountain,
spotting but never seen by blue and yellow children
like Ferdinand and Isabella urging their boats
across the ruffled pond before the palace,
skirting benches along the periphery, ignored
by teenagers smoking and couples spooning but not
by a child at the north gate ( where I'd entered
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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