If You Knew
What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.
A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Notes
After Shakespeare asks what happens to love when we know the beloved must disappear, Ellen Bass carries that knowledge into the supermarket aisle: strangers choosing bread and fruit, each unknowingly walking toward some private grief. Mortality makes anonymity difficult to sustain; once we imagine the hidden losses of another person, the distance between stranger and intimate briefly collapses, and ordinary attention begins to resemble an ethical obligation. October does not ask us to mourn everything in advance, only to notice how much tenderness becomes possible when we remember that none of us are permanent. #October #EllenBass #Decay #Mortality #Poetry
Ellen Bass, "If You Knew" from The Human Line. Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Bass.