Izabela Filipiak, born in Szczecin, Poland, in 1962, currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. The author of ten books, she has earned considerable critical acclaim, and her work has been translated into several languages. While maintaining literary and political ties with her homeland, Filipiak has begun to establish herself here, giving a talk on Polish Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered and women's rights at the Commonwealth Club of California, and participating in the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group at the University of California-Berkeley.

Madame Intuita

My whole life's like learning a second language-
so many immigrant sacrifices and in the end
I can't get rid of this accent,
recognized everywhere to my dismay.
And I'd been feeling quite assimilated!
All that effort, and for what?

Discouraged without wanting to admit it,
I enroll in a class of heightened conversation.
There, I also speak with an accent-
even thicker-sometimes I lose whole threads
or connections. I guess it can't be helped.

You could call this a 'mother tongue'
but I don't have a mother, only a handful
of old wives' tales and myths: watch the distracted
woman dancing on a tightrope-will she fall?
will she find something to grab onto?
The careful charting of her shifts in mood
doesn't exactly encourage fluency.

That other language, elusive yet familiar, is like water:
slips through my fingers, now empty again
but for a trace of dampness, an aftertaste
of crystalline pleasure. Like an early Renaissance poet,
I savor the elaborate undergirding of Latin
with its praiseworthy logic and concision.
Despite efforts to blot out that passionate study,
it will never fully disappear.

The language of the educated classes
gives me an edge in rhetorical contests.
But in the heat of the moment
I lose sight of its sensible rules,
the origins of words grow uncertain.

Unsure of myself, I stop speaking altogether
and just listen to the cascade of sounds-
a mountain stream spilling onto a valley of rocks
which disappears like a shaky pulse, an echo,
a gnome-Now you hear me, now you don't-
and before I’m able to laugh, I have to wade
through layers of hurt and shame. How to cope?

Elsewhere I come upon fragments of letters, stories broken off.
I tie up those loose ends, restore lines with my brush.
I’m content, I only look, I don't say a thing,
don't dare to breathe so as not to frighten
this roadside creature half-woman, half-beast.
When I turn around and look that way again
will I find at least a print from her tiny hoof?


Izabela Filipiak, trans. Karen Kovacik


Mme Intuita Passing As a Phoenix

Madame Intuita reflects on the origins
of her name-
intuitas sum-
as in pondering
meditating
seeing with her Third Eye
(she's fond of juggling definitions like balls of light)

though she immediately tosses out that idea
along with the rest of her journal
in which she’s jotted down
the history of her soul's hunger
Hambre del alma

She envisions herself ironically
standing on stilts
on the third step of a ladder
offering shelter
to all manner of subcelestial poets

She tries on a red wig
and drapes a veil over her face
which also happens to be red
and suddenly she's transmuted into flame
burning at her own stake
and shortly after, she disappears
into a crowd of distinguished guests
vanishes at a tram stop
confuses which key is which
covers her tracks

She crooks her head
like a contented bird
smoothing and ruffling her feathers
seeing her reflection in a puddle
A sudden and unseemly transformation
down to the tracing of the papillary line

Mme Intuita remembers
why she has returned to the source
She wants to exalt
some bonnes amies
and herself