Carrasco Studio

Summer Poems

Thinking about hot summer nights and Luna Moths brought up the poems about summer.....sommolent, steamy, sensuous summer.  I am so sick of snow.

Luna

Pale and plump,
the woman with bright red hair
dances alone
 on the gazebo floor.

The sleeves
of her green chiffon dress
and her fiery hair
incandesce
beneath the fluorescent lights.

Click, click, her tiny feet,
her  silver heels sound
on the boards
as she sways in circles,
with the  insects whirling
in the flare of lights,
and a single trumpet
blaring.



Summer Light

Late afternoon
we stand by a window
and watch pale birds
descend to summer lawns.

I close the slats and turn
to see the bars of sun,
thin yellow slits
 across the curves
and hollows of your chest.

Centripetal,
the air spins round
a brown man scored
by fingernails of light.

Around, again,
the summer skin,
the lines, the light,
again. Again.

Jennifer M. Carrasco...1/6/08

Snow, Ice and Calligraphy Lumped together

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

Black Cat Black/ A Poem that's not about Cats

 
The black cat burns a hole in the universe.
She reclines on a bed of marigolds
and surveys me with her agate eyes.
Scarlet poppies rise against the sky
behind her.

Her  blackness destroys her own volume
And drags me through the cat shape
into the negative

where green poppies
wave against an apricot sky
and the cat scorches her form,
a white hot brand,
      onto  a bed of purple marigolds.  

Jennifer M. Carrasco/ 11/28/08

Figure Eight/Poem/Jennifer Carrasco

Figure Eight


My days gather food for the moon in my head.
Bumblebees, solemn as businessmen,
sell stock in basil, rising and falling
with small bags of pollen.
The gourds squirt  vines
and an orange sun leaps
down the mockingbird’s throat
when he opens his beak
to broadcast the morning.

These are gifts I send out in the night
on the backs of dark mullet
who fin toward the moon.
Who eats them and explodes.
Her children burst out, float down my nose
dance on my wrists, crawl into my eyes.

Waking, I see animals shimmer
in herds on my walls. Turtles and scarabs
are notes on the staff of the blinds
on the windows. The lines on my palm
glow like tree bones.  My door shines,
a cave opening to moonlight.

I shake my husband.  “Look, wake up!”
He murmurs, “Streetlights. Nightmares.”
I hum animal melodies and rise
to look at my face in the mirror.
My eyes are blue without pupils,
my tongue’s a silver crocodile.
It eats the reflection.

Acoustics/Poem/ Jennifer Carrasco

Acoustics


Jill and her husband teach music
at home.  Four pianos
in the living room
and two on the porch.
All day harmonies rise,
jostle together
like party balloons
on the ceiling.

Fugues are served at noon.
chords stacked and eaten
in sandwiches that resonate
pleasantly, in the bowels and sinus.

At night whole notes scuttle
under pantry cups
and attic winds stutter
with echoes from the metronome.
Sigh.  Then settle.
Pianissimo

Poem for a Lover

  Suppose That Bouquet of Lilacs and Grass

Detach
so the lilacs leap up
in circles of air
to quick polyphonics
and the grass spears the notes
through the spring constellations
that glitter and hum
on my dining room ceiling. 

I would gallop
round that music,
those stars,
with my polychrome cellophane,
 and make a huge bundle
taped with Japanese stickers
to give to my lover
to hang from the sky
in his bedroom.

All night
the starred songs
would hover.
Vibrate
for him
like wasps
in clear paper.

  
Jennifer M. Carrasco

Pulling Weeds/poem

Pulling Weeds

I snatch some words
like broad-leaved grass;
clutching a single bunch
to tug the sound
out of the dark,
wrenching to snap
the feeder roots
of “gristle”, “ratchet”
and “racist”.

Other words are tubed and supple,
like horsetail reeds,
hollow words disjointed,
channeled through
sexual “o”s
like “louvere”,
“opal” and “doorway”.

The deep words
grow like seeds.
I poke them into furrows,
summon the crumbled murmurs
of “hobble”and “bump”,
build covered words
like “sob”,
or construct a “tunnel;”
the home of the snake.



Jennifer M. Carrasco

Poem for Hard Times

After an evening of depressing news on the TV, money crashing here and there and people shouting "kill the terrorist" when Obama was mentioned at McCain rallys (how crazy are these people!!) I drank three beers and went to bed early.  Now I pay for it...up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 2 am, and worrying in front of the computer.  I ran into a poem I like to read in times of stress.  I'm of a mind that if I take one poem, like aspirin,  I will wake up feeling better in the morning.  Here it is.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Garden Poem.....Jennifer Carrasco

  Odd Gardens

A lady I know plants all her trees

upside-down. Her austere

nature prefers skeletal roots,

how the tips

 appear to crook their fingers.

Beckon her to come closer.

Another woman scatters plastic flowers,

hot pink and turquoise, like vitamins

 in her planter,

supplements

for her real petunias.

My best friend’s garden is

a  deliberate system

disguised as a riot

of leggy perennials

 and matted wildflowers.

 

 In late summer, she places a sign,

“I have gone to CanCun”

on her apartment door

and  she crawls

inside her garden for a month.

 She brings a ball of grocery twine

to tie together the stems

of certain plants

in particular bunches.

Three semicircular clumps

of variegated dahlias,

gathered by their chins,

form the arch of her front porch.

Eleven tomatoes planted in a circle

are tied at their tops

with gothic windows of bound gladioli

to make her chapel for the arts.

Nasturtiums  are crocheted into tents

for her kitchen and bedroom.

Papyrus shelters her bath.

All August

she peers at the world through a curtain

of petals and bees

while her neighbors monitor

songs wafting out of her zinnias,

mud sculptures heaving

up through her hollyhocks

and the furtive morning delivery

 of pornography

to her calendulas.