if you knew

what if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
if you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theatre, 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

do we remember - as sogyal rinpoche asks us -
that we are dying, and everyone and everything else is,
and so treat all beings at all times with compassion?
it is a most generous way to be ..
to be in the present..and presence..

as it is said:
our lives are not precious because they are so valuable..
our lives are precious because they are so fleeting ~