Isabella
written by: Fatima Ijaz
Isabella 0
I see my reflection in the black window
Are those your eyes looking back at me?
Perhaps I lost my way in those woods
Years ago, walking with you and the dogs.
Isabella, you know I have sought you
For those answers which I could not question
And those questions, which you never answered
Must you always look up at the ceiling
Whilst the candle flame sways in the midnight?
Your tears don’t fall but I can tell
They are about to…
So can anyone, anyone.
Isabella 1
Isabella, you once said
or was that your reflection?
‘you will now walk on water’
I wanted to know what your shadow
qualified as transparent liquid
but you smiled mysteriously
and I understood
that I will never understand
and so I must walk on the very water
of this thought, tremulously
nervously
perhaps forever
Isabella 2
Do you remember the solitary stare
of the midnight of his eyes?
the black shine of his body as it ran?
I remember you laughing
saying things
amongst many, this:
“Americans have dogs as best friends!”
as you pet Indigo
that happy summer we both were
just beginning to trust each other with
our smiles.
Isabella 3
Yaadein bhee kitnee ajeeb hotee hein na, Isabella?
Memories of the first sun
as it fell into the mountains
from a home we were beginning to call
our own. You with your bright eyes
had said: It’s a ceremony of evenings!
so we started each evening
in a delicious sunlight melting into our bodies
there were no other places I wanted to be
there were no other people
I wanted to know
except perhaps when the suns collided
into those sunflowers you bought me
and I forgot your name suddenly.
Isabella 4
I did not know the rhythm of the lake
but I could touch the wind with my hand
in your racing car
you were so upset that day,
even called my music, ‘a loop to hellish
daily repetition’
the same cassette I had painstakingly
recorded for you
but I don’t care, Isabella
I choose to remember you for
you were a lake in fury that morning.
Isabella 5
The black laughter follows me home
I arrive that day with my friends
late at night, from an Indian retreat
you stand there, magnificent, waiting
at the steps of that big house
“What if something happened?
What would I tell your mother?”
I am clueless what the real matter is
I had just come back from seeing
a night sky full of so many, so many stars!
I was dying to tell you
but you were afraid, maybe like the time
you had gone hiking and two men
had stopped you and you said:
“My honor or my death!”
Isabella 6
Maybe I should have never gone with Pamela
to explore the Oneonta night from a
scintillating height.
And maybe I should have never seen
crystals evoking the parallel present,
nor the way she could look into my eyes
and tell my mind to listen
to deeper truths than I yet knew of
or maybe, when she said
she heard about two lovers who could
stand at a distance
and yet love with their electric eyes,
I should have stayed home with you
working out a way to understand
the earth of a four frequency.
Maybe then your dance wouldn’t haunt me
so many years later,
as you defied authority, marked boundary
and repetitively chanted ‘no’ with your
dancing body.
The most powerful performance I ever yet saw
was the way your arms moved,
straight arrows
your burnt orange dress helplessly
following you
wherever you would go.
Isabella 7
I have left you again
from that afternoon when I was leaving
packed all my belongings
but when I turn to say goodbye
You turn the other way, sitting at the table –
where we once used to have red wine with your
ceaseless assortment of salads –
and with a cigarette in your hand,
bid me a smoky farewell
without a wave or a voice, of course.
I cannot get that image out of my mind.
Isabella 8
I want to tell you
if I never meet you again
and chances are, I never will
not because we are not of the same world
or frequency
but because so much has become impossible
to express, to listen to.
I think I walked into the swimming pool
once again afraid I would fall
and you found that impossibly funny
and kept repeating it for days.
It is not like all that did not happen, Isabella
but that perhaps it has passed
into time’s sleeve, and been sewn
into so many nights,
that I don’t dare tear it out to see where
the star is buried.
But I want to tell you
that on days when I am most quiet
your memory floats in like a soap bubble
from Cinderella’s time. And I can see in it
such spectacular sights!
Isabella 9
I’ve opened this lost door to you, Isa
perhaps because if I whisper long enough
maybe you’ll become a reality,
or perhaps because I’ve met someone
who compels me to visit you
not by anything they said
but rather by the wind as it swept past you
in a memory that shoulders sorrow
for the same breath
carries in their breath also.
Isabella 10
I experienced life after you
and never thought of you –
not because I wouldn’t be so inclined –
but because I lost that part of me
that responded to rain
so as to stand very close to it
and let it reach me,
I lost the ability to see color
in obvious tea cups, autumnal rainbows.
I lived in a complete darkness.
So how could I find you?
In the shadow of my shadow, however,
you seem to have lingered
and bravely I take out the goblet
of your name today.
Isabella 11
For before you, I had not experienced an other
in quite a similar way.
Allow me to explain.
You walked into my life from a live painting
a classical quartet
a wild page of nature.
I couldn’t fathom at that time
what was happening.
I knew it was a golden time, that’s all.
I did not know why, I did not know how.
But somewhere, somehow
it was the first time I felt
the beauty of a woman
wrapped in the shawl of a single resultant word
you gifted to me the evening you called me
your second-skin daughter.
Isabella 12
I used to know, back then
what I wanted
even if it was the flaw itself
lately, I do not know at all.
I saw a huge painting of a
woman’s eye in my dream,
it had an orange, earth-colored
background. I wonder
if it was you?
You still connect me to archetypes,
for it had the perceptive nuance
of a seer.
I take a strand of my hair, divide
it into two, and twist it
till I reach the end.
Isabella 13
In the mornings I was
working at your store,
we would have breakfast
at that fancy bagel shop.
As you sat there in your
blue dress, you watched
people go by.
Down the street
was Pamela’s shop,
‘The PathFinder.’
Isabella 14
Your shop was bringing
local artists, foreign artists
to practical purpose. It carried
everything essential
from artist color crayons, to
scented soap. But the business
was dry, and nothing more
than accounting. Your dream
of the girl holding her heart
lacked a heartbeat.
Pamela’s shop treated me
like an initiate. It carried
tarot card decks, crystals,
dragons, singing bowls.
The first time I walked
into her shop, she
celebrated me.
But even when I was leaving
your carefully constructed
and detailed venture
(the same one that caught fire
and I received the call
that informed you)
I knew in the tea leaves
of my fated life
that I would miss you.
Isabella 15
I wonder what you would say to me now
if you knew
that as I walk, I see a shadow
not my own.
You once saw in a painting I drew
that ‘her hands are tied’
you were pointing out
subconscious rhythms.
When I returned from visiting
a childhood friend, you said:
“You never said the word ‘cool’
before!”
When I dreamt of a high priestess
you told me they were Egyptian.
Isabella 16
You read my poems carefully
and I remember printouts
coming one after the other
of “The Becoming.”
It was the same printer
you used for your PhD
dissertation.
One of those poems
roamed the world
on your idea of a
traveling quilt.
You wanted me to look at
the theme of woman
in my work.
Isabella 17
We were estranged when I left
the city
but I left you a message
on your answering machine.
‘I would have been a sister
to the one coming.’
Years later, from another
continent, I sent you
a poem about the Oneonta moon.
You responded graciously, neatly.
Isabella 18
I think all the time we were together
you were telling me secrets
which I am still unraveling.
One day, in a philosophical mood,
cigarette in hand,
you said:
“It will be someone else. Like him,
but another.”
Your move to intellectualize
a prophecy was such
a perfect recipe.
Isabella 19
There are days I lose faith in myself
In the cosmic alive of my once pulse
they imply my poems lack resonance
a bit of my soul turns ash
they deny them reading time
because they claim these
writings are abstruse
but I wonder
what they really mean
beneath their dismissal
I wonder what you would say, Isabelle.
How did you go on believing
against belief itself?
and constructed an empire of words.
Isabella 20
I am reaching out to you from the dark
conjuring you from the past
reaching into sacred and searing memories
I think you would say:
learn to laugh in the sun.
You would peer into my pyramid tent
And see me there with my books,
a lost look on my face.
You would then say:
Look for the atom of the revival.
