“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
The Buddhist tradition’s provocative Maranasati meditation focuses on the contemplation of one’s own death and physical dissolution. When we are in greater touch with the certainty of our individual impermanence, so the thinking goes, we’ll live more awake to the present and wiser in what we prioritize in our lives. In the poem If You Knew, Ellen Bass takes a different angle on this idea. Her poem offers an invitation to consider this: how might our approach with others shift should we be in greater touch with the certainty of their individual impermanence?
Posted by Guest Editor Sam Shapiro
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?
Ellen Bass
From: The Human Line
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