Amid the dull whine of leafblowers <br />by which this block sets its ordinary clock <br />a drama occurs. My neighbor Leon <br />is felled by a stroke. His Avon lady <br />wife Marcy dresses up to walk up <br />the hill to the hospital. Meanwhile, <br /> <br />I sit here in the insulation called <br />not-my-turn and contemplate <br />Anne’s similes and metaphors: Snow <br />White’s “cheeks as fragile as cigarette <br />paper, ” dwarves “little hot dogs.” <br />I take Marcy some zucchini soup, <br /> <br />a rising to another’s emergency <br />against the day that I’m the emergency, <br />the one straining at the tearing bonds <br />of my most recent cocoon, shivering <br />forth fragile, stained, bedraggled, <br />into some strange unimaginable land. <br /> <br />Or will it have leafblowers? Creatures <br />who show themselves as my familiars <br />by resembling hot dogs and cigarettes? <br />I think only nothing is unimaginable, <br />yet I know there are those who claim to have <br />imagined it, beyond the usefulness of zero, <br /> <br />as a kind of place that is of course, <br />paradoxically, no place. My neighbor <br />has already become a kind of place <br />where Leon used to be, but so far <br />his absence is not nothing. <br />So far memory’s imagination serves.<br /><br />Diane Gage<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/reading-anne-sexton/
