A Poem by Ellen Bass
At Jody’s Diner, in September.
(Sometimes, when life run too deep, I can’t find my own words.)
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?
—Ellen Bass
The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)