For all we know
We may never meet again
Before you go
Make this moment sweet again
We won't say goodnight
Until the last minute
I will hold out my hand
And my heart will be in it
For all we know
This may only be a dream
We come and we go
Like the ripples of a stream
So love me
Love me tonight
Tomorrow was made for some
Tomorrow may never come
For all we know
Songwriters: J. Coots / Sam M. Lewis
For All We Know lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, Carlin America Inc
I’m fourteen years old, a white kid living in suburban San Jose, and I’ve just bought a soul album by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway because I liked the track “Where is the Love” that was on the same vinyl. But there was this song, “For All We Know” that tiptoed into my heart and never let go. Though I was too young to consciously understand such poignant lyrics, I must have grasped their depth because they’ve continued to play in my head and my heart for almost fifty years.
The song was featured in last night’s “Pose” on FX and made it relevant, hopefully, to a whole new generation. Featuring yet another heart-wrenching performance by the incomparable Billy Porter, I contemplate how the song may play out in other’s lives as it has in mine.
Poetry, as my friend Geoff Lewis sagely tweeted the other day, “exists firmly above the fray.” For souls weary of the never-ending stream of banal and narcissistic word-soup coming at us 24/7, poets and songwriters have the power to reinvigorate, snapping us back into profound awareness of this moment. This may only be a dream, and tomorrow may never come, indeed.
The song’s backstory alone in enigmatic enough. Written in 1934 by J. Fred Coots and Sam M. Lewis, the song has been recorded perhaps more than any other in history by a long list of notables, The lyrics interpreted through a prism of being gay or an outsider dangerously risking much by putting his heart out there to a potential lover takes the song to a state of longing-bittersweetness rarely achieved before or since. Certainly the juxtaposition of the song within the framework of the men’s lives in “Pose” (based upon Jenny Livingston’s groundbreaking documentary “Paris is Burning”). These lives are not going to be long-lived with the AIDS epidemic lurking in a racist and homphobicly charged America of 1987.
For me, almost five decades of experience infuse the song with the knowledge that love, like life itself is fleeting. So many I’ve loved have come and gone like ripples of a stream. So, love my friend, love as if tomorrow never comes.
