Our mittened hands upon the snow-capped stone,
we stood and watched what once was river zag
a black and crazy trickle through the ice.
The bridge was not enough to heal the gap
that severs brothers’ hands. Our minds were one.
Her patience was a hopeless miracle.
Boxed in a narrowness she always feared,
and housed in solid cold she was too thin
to stand, she took it kindly, like herself,
who all that day had not been like herself.
The music could have pleased her; even more
these named, familiar trees, this cobbled stream
that from her youth had memorized her face.
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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