Ellen Bass, poet (94)

I've fallen off the daily wagon, haven't I? A friend on FB just asked when I'd post again, and I muttered something about ceanothus and thrashers (which, yes, I do plan to say something about, one of these days, assuming I remember). And then I scrolled a little farther down FB and saw this poem, and I said to myself, I want to remember this one. And isn't that partly what I use this blog for? So even though I posted another Ellen Bass poem not too long ago, and about more or less the same subject, here's this one, which is stunning, and now I can come back and find it easily when I need a reminder:

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?

 

 

Ironically or not, the image that I found to illustrate this poem is from the obituary of a beloved St. Louis ticket taker, John Thompson. 

And although my numbering is completely irrelevant anymore, for the sake of an orderly mind I'm gonna head to 100 anyway. Maybe I'll try to make up the last few on a daily basis, for old times' sake . . .