Walking a long time in the fields of the dead
I stopped where the grass
flared thickly, and leaned on a stone
to rest from the high sun.
I sat there cooling in my sweat, tracing
the worn lines, names and years
and the little graven images that harvest shadow.
The names flooded me. In the still air
they rose above the stone
like heat waves.
Points of flame winked at the tips of grasses
and Solomon entered me,
still mourning Abigail,
mourning Samuel, Jesse, John,
none of them lasted a year,
and finally Iris, wife of Solomon, also mourning,
gone but not forgotten.
Not quite yet.
All around me the small slabs sunken in the grass
and a few mansions, pale grey
and innocent.
I felt a road running beneath where I lay.
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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