If You Knew.

• Author: Bass, Ellen
• Position: Poem

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...