If You Knew.

   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
   or press your fingertips,
   into the crease of a life line.

   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's most recent book of poetry, "Mules of Love," won the Lambda Literary Award. This poem is from "The Human Line," forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2007. She teaches poetry and creative writing in Santa Cruz, California.