The Art of Drowning

The Art Of Drowning


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.

Billy Collins

Posted over on Poemhunter