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; the art of drowning
The ocean was his great equalizer. At some point after he fell into Ambrose's inheritance, Sin bought the stretch of beach that had always been his anyway, even if the possession was never physical until then. It was here that Chaus burned away the last of his curse and gave it to Sinjin, walked through the fire that he, too, would someday walk through; it was here that there was a grave, now broken, with the name Tohias written upon it. His first home, his first love, his soul lost and recovered again -- all here, on this very shore.
He left a trail in his wake. His boots came off first so he could feel the cold sand at his feet, more grounding than any rock could be, followed by his trench coat; soon his shirt was caught by some breeze as he unbuttoned it, pulled out to sea. In the end, he was left with a pair of loose cotton pants, sitting with his forearms resting on his knees with the cold water lapping at his equally cold feet.
Sinjin, at his best points, was a jester, a fool: he made a mockery of the world around him, laughed until it laughed back at him. At his worst points, his truest points, he was a broken man who had been glued back together too many times for any sort of sense to be made. Muddy gray eyes, flat as the coming dawn which painted the horizon, watched the endless ocean before him. Out there, he realized, there was no fire waiting to lick at his heels. There was nothing for him to take apart and put back together again and nothing to do the same to him.
He rose. Sand clung to the lines of his scarred body as the sea-salt air whipped across his hair, sticking to his face; he stepped out and the first grip of cold water began to pull him further, calling him home like a brother. He walked, mindless of the cold as it crawled up his body, until he could walk no more and began to swim. He swam, feeling the whispers of a thousands aches fall off of him, until he could fight the current no longer and it spat him back out onto the sand.
Caked with sand and salt and ocean, Sinjin Fai began to watch the sunrise as a glorious emptiness filled him.
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; the art of drowning
The ocean was his great equalizer. At some point after he fell into Ambrose's inheritance, Sin bought the stretch of beach that had always been his anyway, even if the possession was never physical until then. It was here that Chaus burned away the last of his curse and gave it to Sinjin, walked through the fire that he, too, would someday walk through; it was here that there was a grave, now broken, with the name Tohias written upon it. His first home, his first love, his soul lost and recovered again -- all here, on this very shore.
He left a trail in his wake. His boots came off first so he could feel the cold sand at his feet, more grounding than any rock could be, followed by his trench coat; soon his shirt was caught by some breeze as he unbuttoned it, pulled out to sea. In the end, he was left with a pair of loose cotton pants, sitting with his forearms resting on his knees with the cold water lapping at his equally cold feet.
Sinjin, at his best points, was a jester, a fool: he made a mockery of the world around him, laughed until it laughed back at him. At his worst points, his truest points, he was a broken man who had been glued back together too many times for any sort of sense to be made. Muddy gray eyes, flat as the coming dawn which painted the horizon, watched the endless ocean before him. Out there, he realized, there was no fire waiting to lick at his heels. There was nothing for him to take apart and put back together again and nothing to do the same to him.
He rose. Sand clung to the lines of his scarred body as the sea-salt air whipped across his hair, sticking to his face; he stepped out and the first grip of cold water began to pull him further, calling him home like a brother. He walked, mindless of the cold as it crawled up his body, until he could walk no more and began to swim. He swam, feeling the whispers of a thousands aches fall off of him, until he could fight the current no longer and it spat him back out onto the sand.
Caked with sand and salt and ocean, Sinjin Fai began to watch the sunrise as a glorious emptiness filled him.