If a man walks with one hand on the baby carriage
As he argues with the mother but picks blossoms
From the park trees to fold into the carriage
And does love the child beyond endurance
While his tiny trinity walks toward the iron gate
On its way home, the child now one face
Among the baffling faces of flowers, a bristling
Rolling cushion of cherry limbs, and the woman
Wants to love the man but cannot forgive
And watches the carriage filling like a heart
With pink wounds, no one fatal, but all
Broken carelessly by a man beautiful
But beyond touch, beyond loss and longing,
And the woman sees her own eyes
Among the blossoms filled with questions
And desire, and the sun shines through
The straw brim of het hat in a lattice pattern
Onto her forehead, and there are other
Walkers in the park, and all the men
Are breaking blossoming branches
With the best of intentions and hope for forgiveness,
How long can babies and trees survive, how soon
Will the world tire of good intentions and bad husbands?
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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