Female flesh
Dissolving into artichokes
Exploding stars
Snowflakes
And the expanding leaves of water lilies
At the top left hand comer of a dark screen
A Latin American tenor
In cameo cut out sings
“Brazil”
Moving round the frame
And across a diagonal
Series of bamboo canes
Over
The S.S. Brazil
Arriving in New York Harbor
Passengers bustle down the gangway
Organ grinders’ monkeys crawl through
Artificial palm trees
At the Club New Yorker
Across a tropical island
Set
Covered in yellow clad girls who whirl
Giant bananas
Or tum them
Into a banana xylophone
Carmen Miranda
On top of a wagon
In a hat and corsage
Of bananas and strawberries
Five feet high
With a cornucopia of bananas
Sprouting from her head
As far as the eye can see
A child
Wears a metal sleeve
Electrically illuminated
Which dissolves into a succession of
Metal hoops
Glowing brilliantly
As they wind away into
A pitch dark screen
Accompanied by a sumptuous and exotic
Arrangement for strings
Girls
In mauve leotards
Swing the hoops
Above their heads
In an effect of extraordinary daring and beauty
Others slowly revolve
Polka dots
Like gambling counters
Pink green mauve white
As the figure of
A blue skirted girl is split
Into four
Refracted
Again and again
As in the splintered image of a kaleidoscope
Amber and gold
Snow drop and clover leaf
The color in its wacky patterns
Achieves something of the intensity
Described by Huxley
Under mescaline
Finally the cast emerge
From the center of the kaleidoscope
Singing
“A Journey To A Star”
Until the whole screen bubbles
With tiny heads
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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