Narcissus was finally released, though sentenced
by demonic pardon to wander the ends of earth
searching for her. In southern Arizona, he heard
she’d settled nearby, rooted in alkaline soil.
He had a hunch she’d go where beauty was dry.
Ranch owner, local eccentric, she spent
too much time alone by local standards.
She’d turned to art, sculpture, the most
substantial art, taking as her inspiration
the Grand Canyon, not its weathered stone
escarpments, but the space they bring forth.
She made gargoyles from brass, copper, tin —
always in pairs. Their eyes first opened
in a crucible and they hold that heat in
blood pools, each floating an iris, yellow,
surrounding the pupils’ uniform black.
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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