They have come from dinner at the nearest new restaurant —
you know the kind: bottle glass in the window,
brass rails, and a fanciful line of red neon
on the wall. They have known enough to
order Sancerre with the fish. And now they
stoop in the rapidly-gathering twilight,
helping each other off with their coats.
She is wearing a dress from Alcott and Andrews.
The sprigged white flowers like breaths on a black field
cannot chasten the lines of her body
as the air tones down to meet her silhouette.
A necklace flickers briefly
at her throat like an eddy of silver
from a subterranean river.
Then the last light fails with a palpable after-image,
as if it had fled down the throat of an hourglass.
I imagine the stagehand flinging the iron
wheel of the rheostat to bring on this darkness
as if tilting the world with his hand.
For a moment they seem like our first parents, lorn
on the veldt, that barbaric gold light fading;
and, of the strange cries in the night ahead,
none stranger than that of their own conjunction,
the constellations unnamed above them
and God not yet interpreted; only
this clamor for a voice and its intimation
in the ear of an ambiguous companion,
no better than oneself, but other.
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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