Callow and amorphous, not gods
but adjectives flung at the sun
whose hot fibers protest their distance
lovingly, touching our skulls lovingly.
This is not a desert.
This is a place where a pedestrian stops,
thinking the face in the window is an owl’s.
The face in the window is a Renaissance Youth
eternally snivelling under a green umbrella.
Across the street, it is written drunk doom
in large bold, short-circuiting the stifled
drowsy, unimpassioned grief scrawled in London.
Much of London I don’t recall, although names
sail back to me on small craft, like plunder.
Loss of names is a kind of leakage
but there is another: the actual scale
breezing along in daring episodes,
most of it escaping utterance, falling
back into the temple housing Callow and amorphous
as well as enchanted, and waits for something
to spirit it toward us, away from the unrecovered.
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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