Two verticals lie down,
each to the other, a horizon,
each to the other,
alone and unaligned.
But can we not bend Time
until we touch and cross,
unafraid to overrun
the map that Nature put us on?
My altered angle runs away
from yours until, halfway
around the world, we meet again,
the map’s four corners gone,
love’s parallels concluding
at the fevered poles where
day for one is never-ending
night for its opposite.
It’s there that barefoot angels
dance to music that we cannot
hear, but try to, being human.
We are two lines, pulled
up & down the globe by Time
& Choice & Circumstance
until Eternity marries us,
and two become one.
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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