The Art Of Drowning
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by Billy Collins (1941 - )
I wonder how it
all got started, this business
about seeing your
life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as
if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle
time into such compression, crushing
decades in the
vice of your desperate, final seconds.
After falling off
a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of
floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more
leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages
of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony
or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
How about a short
animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life
expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form
be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole
existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing
explosion of biography-
nothing like the
three large volumes you envisioned.
Survivors would
have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt
of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light
before all the lights go out,
dawning on you
with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something
does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it
will probably be a fish,
a quick blur of
curved silver darting away,
having nothing to
do with your life or your death.
The tide will
take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink
toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind
what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now
overrun with the high travel of clouds.
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