what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

If You Knew

Ellen Bass

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?

From The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Bass. Used without permission 

2 Comments

continuum.

Shortly after reading this poem for the first time I took Junior and Junior Junior to a movie, an actual movie in the theater. The clerk that sold us tickets also sold concessions. He was visibly disturbed by the fact that I ordered some popcorn with butter, rolling his eyes with a long exhale. Then when he handed it to me my hand accidentally brushed his hand and that really seemed to creep him out. Another clerk tore a little rip in our paper tickets but our hands didn’t touch. I smiled and thought of this poem.

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