De Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver Billy Collins werd geboren in New York op 22 maart 1941. Zie ook alle tags voor Billy Collins op dit blog.

 

The First Dream

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

 

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.

 

Sterrenstelsels

Ja, daarginds staat Orion,
de drie knoopjes van de riem
helder op een rij boven de horizon.

En als je je omdraait kan je
Gemini zien, heel lichtgeraakt vannacht,
de tweelingen kijken weer eens van ons weg, de ruimte in.

Dat groepje, wat hoger in de lucht,
is Cassiopeia, zittend in haar astrale stoel
als ik me niet vergis.

En recht boven ons,
is dat niet Virginia Woolf
die de Ouse afzakt

in haar opblaasbare kano?
Kijk, de breedgerande hoed en daar,
de omtrek van de peddel, geheven, druipend van sterren.

 

Vertaald door Chris Coolsma en Marijke Oomen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 22^e maart ook mijn blog van 22 maart 2019 en ook mijn blog van 22 maart 2016 en mijn twee blogs van 22 maart 2014.