Reviewed by Judith H. Montgomery
Isadora: A Tragedy in Three Acts by Dale Champlin
Just a Lark Books, 2022, 111 pages, $15.00
ISBN-13 : 979-8887573540
Available at https://www.amazon.com/Isadora-DaleChamplin/dp/B0B7HF2XCH/ref=sr_1_6?
“The poem,” writes Robert Frost in 1939, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Dale Champlin offers both in this fabulously imagined series of spirited “conversations” between a feisty goldfish named Isadora and her tart, aging owner. The elderly “Old Shoe” serves as foil to the impetuous, articulate, and highly observant goldfish, named for the dancer who lived with panache and died with drama.
Why Tragedy? Mortality underwrites the exchanges. Isadora is blunt: The Old Shoe and I are in a race against time (“An Uncertain Future”). The goldfish is confined in her green bowl and Old Shoe almost housebound. Old Shoe suffers through pneumonia, then a heart attack. If she dies, who will take care of Isadora? If Isadora dies first, who will look after Old Shoe?
The pair trade quips and demands, dreams and wishes, as though facing off in a fencing match. In “Buzz Kill” Isadora says:
For her there’s not that much future
to look forward to. I can be a real bitch
but mostly I bite my tongue where
Old Shoe’s concerned—I let her talk.
Old Shoe takes her turn, unleashing pique in “Narcissism”:
Isadora is a narcissist.
‘Me, me, me, me, me, me,’
she bubbles. She’s pretending
to practice her scales.
I tell her ‘your only scales
are on the outside of your body.’
After that she stops singing.
Their conversations range from their childhoods through alternative pasts and futures, dipping into reincarnation, Mahler’s fifth symphony, Ophelia, Esther Williams, and the Goldfish Manual. They offer intermittent revelations about a sexy deceased husband, Harold, and Old Shoe’s drug-addicted, but handsome son, Jimmy, for whom Isadora holds a special affection.
Both characters speculate on life and purpose. What am I here for? asks Old Shoe early on. She often returns in memory to her thinking stone (“The Edge of Dread”). Isadora, by contrast, lives life as dream and metamorphosis. In “Repent and Be Baptized,” she invokes the Goldfish God:
After a night of turbulent seas—
filled with unseasonable angst,
under too many stars to count or name—
drinking dreams full of the Goldfish God—
Isadora wakes up inspired.
She will become a televangelist! Elsewhere she imagines herself as a begowned bride, a water nymph. Confined, she has limitless imagination.
Each fancies beauty, but every incandescent image is paired with the body’s earthly limits. In “Facial Recognition,” Isadora reminds Old Shoe of
. . . a shimmering angel as she daintily
nibbles her dried insects and sips oxygen from the surface.
I look at her and she gazes at me—a trail of excrement
following her like a towline.
Isadora, having talked Old Shoe into buying her a male goldfish, at first gazes rapturously on her newly acquired lover in “Drunk with Lust”:
Randy, that is my name for him,
wishful thinking most likely, glimmers
bright as an orange peel glazed
with sugar—his scales sleek as a whistle.
But in “Alone at Last,” she turns ruthless: You’re just a goddamn goldfish,’ I tell Randy. And she eats the fertilized eggs he stored in his body: Randy couldn’t talk. . . . I remember how I left him floating on the ceiling of water.
But death might offer options: reincarnation and a door to a next life. In “Out of this World,” Old Shoe recalls rescuing a boy from drowning:
I remember
the dazed look in his eyes like he’d peeked
through an open door into another world
and—that sudden—the door slammed shut.
And in “Where Did This Water Come From,” Isadora dreams of another watery possibility:
Last night I dreamed I was a naiad . . . .
Perhaps I could soar as a bird
swimming through air instead of water.
It is beyond my fondest hope to be human.
The verbal dance of wit and admiration sometimes unites the characters to swim in a cathedral of music:
Celestial voices echo the closing bars
of the Adagietto from Mahler’s
Fifth symphony. Isadora is in sympathy
with the solitary artist. Black water
swallows the world of her bowl.
“For Goldfish Time is Approximate”
In “An Unreliable Narrator,” even Old Shoe’s memories appear as water music:
She is carried along—
immersed and submerged.
One at a time small memories
bubble to the surface. Behind her
facemask every oxygen rush
prompts another breath.
Water is both beginning and end: after Randy’s end, Isadora apprehensively traces the flow of water from their house through sewers all the way to the catastrophic sea. (“Today I Blow Bubbles”) To counter her future disposal and oblivion, she imagines a fancy water park in the sky.
Champlin ends her book when conversation stops. It is too late to have/the last word (“The End of the Conversation”), but the survivor wants it anyway. As do we. Our lives are intrigued and enriched through Champlin’s fertile imagination that has riffed on care and jousting companionship and survival. Begin in delight. End in wisdom.
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