domingo, 3 de janeiro de 2010

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.


By: Billy Collins


1 comentários:

ZeNz0r disse...

Well i haven't actually gone through any near death experiences, but im guessing that near the end when you loose all your strength and accept that there's nothing that will save you, or even that you can do to save yourself... that somehow you will start thinking about your life. What you'v achieved, or could have. Who you'r with on a daily basis. What you'r about to loose. I don't quite think you'll think about the stain on your shirt from 5days ago. But i'm guessing that's what they mean with "life flashed before your eyes".

I just hope when i die, and this flash comes to pass, i can make a positive balance out of it. Up 'till now i think im coming short, so lets hope that moment still takes a while to come by.

Dispite having a diferent opinion, your text did give me something to think about and it was a pleasant read. Cheers ^^

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