With two feet of snow in our backyard, I am very conscious of the colors( and inconvenience) of true winter weather. Seattle doesn't get this stuff very often.
We talked a lot in my watercolor classes about glazes and how colors could be cool or warm, and when I went to look for examples, I found a few examples in my old journals about Alaska. I also found a couple of drawings that reminded me of the beauty and the harshness of Alaska winter....getting up at 4 am and standing on a path in a snowy valley with aurora borealis crackling (yes, in quiet places you hear the crackle!) overhead, and just the mechanics of staying warm and alive when you are sleeping overnight in a tiny shed with the snow drifting in the corners.
At this time, I was going back and forth from Alaska and Seattle, and my Seattle home was with a Japanese American woman who is a dancer and a painter. She exhibits in the US and Japan, and I would often come home to a living room totally wallpapered with her work. We would sit in the middle of the room and meditate on these 6' tall sheets of Japanese calligraphy...all the same poem and done in a style I called "grass writing," an especially lovely type of calligraphy...very fluid and organic, with a "beat" of darker ink every where the painter re- loads her brush.
Because I was in an environment of snow, and ice forming over black Arctic water. I somehow tied it all together in a sestina...linking Yoko's calligraphy...the whiteness of her paper, the black ink and the suspense of making a wrong move.....to the snow of Alaska, the danger and beauty of walking over new ice, and the rewards and terrors of taking chances.
A sestina is a form I especially like in poetry. You use six "old" words....ones that have had meanings way back...Indo-European words.....in six stanzas with the old words at the end of each line in a different order for each stanza. Then you finish it up with a triplet using all six words. It's tricky but fun....and you can work on a poem like that for years.
Entrance
The loaves of ice and fish, the ocean into stone.
That sable sweep of water
beneath the miracle of ice
where I stride over fishes,
over ocean's highest mountains,
on sheaves of cold and perfect light.
A woman shapes the brush, adjusts the light
and grinds her stick of ink against the stone.
Morphing pungent dust; stick and mountain
pulverize, transform to ink black water.
Her brush dips and strikes on paper. Fish
and serpents leap in lines like marks in cracking ice.
I creep, a cautious god on ice,
on avenues of thickened light.
A brilliant sheet between the fish
and sun, transparent stone
that sprawls across pure water;
grinds it into rip-rap mountains.
Fresh ink thumps between mountains,
those white intervals of paper. The woman's skin shines like ice
lit from behind. Her blood shifts to black water
and travels through her brush. Uneven light
hovers among characters, calligraphy breaks the stone
of paper, the woman's heart breaks, she becomes fishes.
I ask for my place among fish.
I could hack through rhyme, invert mountains
to touch fathoms. Drop lines heavy with bait and stones
and wait outside as day fades and my eyes turn to ice.
Or teeter on chance. Shout when ice shatters light
And I plunge into the dark arms of water.
Her breath is a slow current of water
and her brush moves in schools of fish.
To drown or wait and bury light?
In and out, her forms retreat to mountains,
to blizzard peace, and then return to ice,
the opening of passion and slipping down like stone.
The stone cracks, black leads split like skin on mountains.
Whales breach the dark water and gulls dive for fish.
I balance on ice, and wait for the sea to flicker with light.
Jennifer M. Carrasco
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