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, If You Knew
In November we remember all souls...
