Name: Lisa Pasold
Hometown: Montreal
Current City: Paris, France
Occupation: Writer
Age: Nearly half a century
What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry is breathing with others.
Favorite poem:
“Tonight” by the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali—a poem which exists in several
versions and appears in his great collection of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight.
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
I’ve reread this book every year since I first discovered it in 2004. This poem in particular
amazes me because I remain (after nearly 15 years of examining the work) moved to tears and
baffled by its exact meaning.
Ali wrote extensively about the ghazal—he translated them, wrote them, edited an anthology of
English-language ghazals, Ravishing DisUnities, and held strident opinions about how the form
should be treated by contemporary poets.
There are three specific aspects of the traditional ghazal form which interest me:
the idea that a ghazal is a necklace, with each couplet an independent bead which can appear at any place on the strand
its repetition—the last word or the last phrase appears in both lines of the first couplet is then repeated as the ending of the second line of each following couplet
the poet must name themselves in the final line of the poem.
But these rules don’t capture the great “why” of this poem’s attraction for me. I keep coming
back to this poem because of Ali’s language, his sense of musicality, spiritual belief, loss,
beauty, and his commitment to the importance of poetry. His ghazal teems with layers of poetic
and literary references, which I only sometimes manage to remember and sort out. (See this excellent
analysis for more info).
Below, I have used roughly half of Ali’s original lines to build a poem about my mother’s death.
After Tonight
by Lisa Pasold
(after the work of Agha Shahid Ali)
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
Those “perfect words” clogging my throat like crickets,
Jingling “universal language”—still possible tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
I’ll fall on my sword some other morning—
Let me weep with no guilt, no expectations, tonight.
Why won’t you let me worship, clear-eyed,
Burning candles instead of books tonight?
Were those promises on the rocks just shrunken snakeskin?
Or did all the archangels—their wings frozen—fall tonight?
Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Those veins twisting in languages I’ll never read,
They multiply across your skin as tattoos tonight.
He’s freed some fire from pop songs in Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.
Your blood is still moving but your mind has frozen.
He’s promised that black curtain won’t fall tonight.
God limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.
Executioners near the woman at the window.
Are we waiting blind for the baying dogs, tonight?
This business of forgiving gives me too many tunes—
Which prayers shall I use while on my knees tonight?
My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
I’ll try standing alone, no shoulder to rest on tonight.
And I, Lisa, escaped alive to tell you—
No God waits, though he sobs in your exiled arms tonight.
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Lisa Pasold is originally from Montreal. Her fifth book, The Riparian, just appeared
from Frontenac House, Canada. She has been writing a poem every day for the past eleven years.
