Amid the dull whine of leafblowers
by which this block sets its ordinary clock
a drama occurs. My neighbor Leon
is felled by a stroke. His Avon lady
wife Marcy dresses up to walk up
the hill to the hospital. Meanwhile,

I sit here in the insulation called
not-my-turn and contemplate
Anne’s similes and metaphors: Snow
White’s “cheeks as fragile as cigarette
paper, ” dwarves “little hot dogs.”
I take Marcy some zucchini soup,

a rising to another’s emergency
against the day that I’m the emergency,
the one straining at the tearing bonds
of my most recent cocoon, shivering
forth fragile, stained, bedraggled,
into some strange unimaginable land.

Or will it have leafblowers? Creatures
who show themselves as my familiars
by resembling hot dogs and cigarettes?
I think only nothing is unimaginable,
yet I know there are those who claim to have
imagined it, beyond the usefulness of zero,

as a kind of place that is of course,
paradoxically, no place. My neighbor
has already become a kind of place
where Leon used to be, but so far
his absence is not nothing.
So far memory’s imagination serves.

Diane Gage

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/reading-anne-sexton/