Live first, write later
Someone–and I’m not sure who, perhaps you?–needs to introduce me to the poet Billy Collins. I’ve been patient. I’ve waited my turn. I’ve written essays about this need. To no avail, dear reader, to no avail. Surely if we put into motion the infamous "six degrees of separation," someone among us can hit pay dirt and connect me to him and/or (with the emphasis on "and") to Johnny Depp. I don’t ask much.
That’s all to say this: for the first time in 1.5 years, I will miss my weekly deadline to post a 37days essay this Monday.
It was sacrificed to a good cause: a weekend on the coast of Oregon in the most magical B&B ever created and no I can’t tell you which one because I pinky-swore that I would keep it a secret, a week of intensive teaching outside Portland in an unairconditioned dorm room and 104 degree temperatures, and now a weekend in Seattle with people who have made me laugh too much and go to Farmer’s Markets and eat too many peaches, granola, pesto, blueberry cobbler, arugula salad, stinky goat ash cheese, and carmelized tofu. Not to name names, but if I had to make up some completely fictitious names, I’d say that "David" and "Lora" are to blame for this last bit in Seattle.
Sometimes, I have come to realize, the writing has to sit in the back seat of the car; the living must drive.
In lieu of a 37days essay, I offer a wee bit of a poem from my new best friend (hint, hint), Billy Collins. I’ll be back soon. Right after cobbler. I’ll end this trip with a glorious train trip home with my daughter, Emma. As you might recall, I love trains.
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
