sestinas

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 became 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
palmtree 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?

Twenty stories high above the desert
with its morning shadows, like the face of a woman wearing
a wide-brimmed hat, you stand quietly so that you won’t
wake
your husband, who sleeps like a tired gardener,
his hands brown from Michigan summer
labor—tomatoes, gypsy peppers, sweet basil and sun flowers.

You love this time of day when the hotel-bordering flowers,
—pansies like eyes and snap dragons like mouths—even
in this desert,
hold dew. To some, this world is beyond summer;
but not to you, a California Girl who will grow old wearing
blue jeans and T-shirts. Your Beefmaster Tomato-gardener
husband loves this city of mirages later in the day, when
it is awake,

But you love it in the morning light before others wake
up and drink their coffee. You are the gypsy flower
at the 6 a.m. blackjack table. Steel Man, husband-gardener
loves his Keno games, tends the numbers. You prefer to
sit with these desert
cactus, old timers who’ve stayed up all night wearing
cigarettes growing inch-long ash from their mouths. Summer

long-gone, their wrinkled wintry hands stack up the chips.
Summer
is a joke to them, here where they’re always awake.

They’ve been around the clock; humor this Snapdragon-lady,
who wearing
her night of sleep like a sprinklered flower,
sits down at their table in the early morning desert.
They know an inhospitable garden and its harsh gardener.

They know that Steel Man sleeping upstairs is not such a
gardener.
They know hard summer;
her wide-brimmed hat shadowing her old face, Dame Desert
is a survivalist. They’ve learned this staying up all night,
awake,
playing blackjack at basil green tables. They could be
sunflowers,
big-rooted, heavy-headed, wearing

Sandy cigarette ash, which has fallen over them for hours;
wearing
the cards like rows of seeds. She is their gardener.
They laugh at nursery-grown flowers
like me. Summer
snapdragons or pansies, newly awake
at 6 a.m. on their private desert.

A desert where they stay up all night wearing
tough, dusty foliage. I love to see Her wake in them, this
gardener
of summer morning blackjack players, these old desert
sunflowers.