Stately, green-shuttered, midwestern
In its space of grass. The House;
But beyond this, weeds in the buckling tar.
And a rotten net hangs unimpressive.
Past this is the ruin of real need.
They never needed it and now it's ruined.
Here no doubt servants pumped the bug spray
(Sounding a hissing fanfare for the soiree.
One might say). Now it's a mess; the gold
Fish bowl, stone benches and the little bridge
All strung with gummy vines. But who
Would have missed it: stripes and ginny punch.
The small embarrassments, the chinese bench
And the fish? Why all this new trouble
For such careful melancholy? Who
Needed you then, who notices now?
You stink and are hard to walk through.
No crocuses grow and your bugs are gross.
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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