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 lifeline’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?
by Ellen Bass
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