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