You could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living room
with the windows open, in our underwear, a
few distant tower rooms looking
down into our window, my nylon bra
gleaming faintly in the heat, my bikini
panties with tiny pale-gold
gibbon monkeys on them . . . We talk about
leaving our son at camp, how finally he
disappeared among the pine boughs, we
could not tell what was amber bough and translucent beetle chrysalis and
what was the body of our love. The wine is
powerful, with a strong body that
fits itself into my mouth but keeps its
lake-pebble shape, wine so gold it
almost has some amber in it,
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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