If You Knew

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

By Ellen Bass

Recorded by Karina Lutz


Note: Due to website limitations, poem line breaks will not be right on all screens, particularly narrow ones. To see the poet’s intended version, please click the Print Friendly button. Or try turning your phone or tablet to landscape orientation.


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?

© 2007 by Ellen Bass. Previously published in The Human Line, Copper Canyon Press.


Photo credit: Irene Young


Ellen Bass’s most recent collection is
Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. www.EllenBass.com

 

3 thoughts on “If You Knew

  1. Oh Ellen, my dear old friend from times long past. Your poetry touches me so deeply. Sending hugs from the distant past to the present moment. I am proud of you.

  2. Pingback: March 2022 Issue |

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.