A Mid-Week Poem

Reflection: We are all “pinned against time”

A few days ago my friend Don Shewey and I exchanged a few poems, and he sent me this one by Ellen Bass. It was one of those poems that broke something open in me and shifted the way I see people.

I work behind the counter at Speedway. I wait on hundreds of people a day just trying to get gas, buy a snack, or get somewhere. Most are kind, some are impatient, and some seem angry before they’ve even reached the register. Ever since reading this poem, I’ve caught myself looking at each person and thinking, You’re going to die. It sounds much harsher written down than it feels in my head.

The grumpy customer isn’t just the thirty seconds they’re standing in front of me. They’re a whole human being with a life I know nothing about, and one day that life will come to an end. People will mourn their passing. Somehow, remembering that has made me a little less reactive.

The poem also keeps turning that same truth back toward me. I’m going to die too. And my dad. And everyone I know.

I’ve been fascinated by death and dying for most of my life. It’s one of those subjects that, if you know me, you’ve probably found yourself talking with me about. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to poets like Mary Oliver. So many of her poems return to death, even when she’s writing about geese, trees, or grass.

For the past few days I’ve been seeing the people around me differently, and I thought I’d pass this poem along.

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If You Knew
Ellen Bass

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?

Source: “If You Knew” by Ellen Bass, from The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

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This poem came to me from my friend Don Shewey, a writer, therapist, and self-described pleasure activist in New York City. His Substack is full of poems, quotations, and reflections that I think many of you would enjoy.

Don’s Substack: Don Shewey

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A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

❧ Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and original artwork featured in Calling the Birds Home are my own.