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DIANE WAKOSKI Sestina from the Home Gardener These dried-out paint brushes which fell from my lips have been removed with your departure; they are such minute losses compared with the light bulb gone from my brain, the sections of chicken wire from my liver, the precise silver hammers in my ankles which delicately banged and pointed magnetically to you. Love has become unfamiliar and plenty of time to tend the paint brushes now. Once unfamiliar with my processes. Once removed from that sizzling sun, the ego, to burn my poet shadow to the wall, I pointed, I suppose, only to your own losses which made you hate that 200-pound fish called marriage. Precise ly, I hate my life, hate its freedom, hate the sections of fence stripped away, hate the time for endless painting, hate the sections of my darkened brain that wait for children to snap on the light, the unfamiliar corridors of my heart with strangers running in them, shouting. The precise incisions in my hip to extract an image, a dripping pickaxe or palm tree removed and each day my paint brushes get softer and cleaner—better tools, and losses cease to mean loss. Beauty, to each eye, differently pointed. I admire sign painters and carpenters. I like that black hand pointed up a drive-way whispering to me. “The Washingtons live in those sections” and I explain autobiographically that George Washington is sympathetic to my losses; His face or name is everywhere. No one is unfamiliar with the American dollar, and since you’ve been removed from my life I can think of nothing else. A precise replacement for love can’t be found. But art and money are precise ly for distraction. The stars popping out of my blood are pointed nowhere. I have removed my ankles so that I cannot travel. There are sections of my brain growing teeth and unfamiliar hands tie strings through my eyes. But there are losses of the spirit like vanished bicycle tires and losses of the body, like the whole bike, every precise bearing, spoke, gear, even the unfamiliar handbrakes vanished. I have pointed myself in every direction, tried sections of every map. It’s no use. The real body has been removed. Removed by the ice tongs. If a puddle remains what losses can those sections of glacier be? Perhaps a precise count of drops will substitute the pointed mountain, far away, unfamiliar? LOVE AND SEX ...

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