Serpentine is about a snake that, while slithering across a road, becomes rather flattened by a passing car. It’s told from the point of view of the car driver, who believes that his killing the snake is an indicator of how the universe works. He sees the snake as a "moving question mark," an indication that he believes the universe appears uncertain. The snake has been moving toward the moment "since birth" and has left its element, as evidenced by the fact that it is "no longer hidden by grass/ or the wet cover of leaves." The entire incident happens in less than a second, but time seems to have been expanded such that much more thought is possible than normal "in the pure daylight of this dilated second." He sees himself as an equal to the snake in the grand scheme of things, though he moves in his "own upright, warm-blooded way." They are both out of their element at the time, the snake on the road and the city man out in the country. He sees his path along the winding country road as equivalent to that twisting path of the snake, for the road "would look like a snake itself/ curling through the dense green woods." As he saw the snake on the road he didn’t have time "to brake or swerve" but could only "keep [his] line." for he believes the two of them "had always been meant to meet here." Reflecting on this he compares reality to an "unknowable graph" which has every event that ever occurred or ever will occur mapped out, and the subjects only going through the motions.

The thoughts of a gardener after reading a passage from Lolita are expressed in Picnic, Lightning. He notes that while a sudden dramatic end, such as being "struck by a meteor/ or single-engine plane/ while reading in a chair at home" is unlikely, life can always throw you the curveballs, such as a heart attack, described as "the power shut off like a switch," or a stroke, "a ship unmoored/ into the flow of bodies rivers" can end it all just as quickly and unexpectedly. The constant hovering of the "instant hand of Death" makes the world seem brighter, and more alive. The "small plants singing" and clouds that are a "brighter white" accentuate the ever-changing beauty of nature, which wouldn’t be so without such an imposing threat.

The Art of Drowning is a reflection on the notions of the last moments of life. It is basically an outright attack, using humor, on the idea of "seeing your life flash before your eyes." In a substantially sarcastic tone it asks "if panic, or the act of submergence" could cause the "crushing [of] decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds." It then drags the flash itself out for ridicule, asking if it wouldn’t be better to see an "album of photographs" or "a short animated film, a slide presentation" or perhaps "an essay, or in one model paragraph." Isn’t the idea of a "eyebrow singeing explosion of biography" less well thought out than the "three large volumes you envisioned"? It points out that while survivors of near death experiences attest to a "brilliance" or "sudden bolt of truth forking across the water," you would probably only see a fish, "a quick blur of silver darting away," if anything at all. And as you sink to the bottom, all that’s above you is the land of the living, the surface, unrecognized and "overrun with the high travel of clouds."

All three of these poems by Billy Collins are focused on death, but each takes a little different view of it. The first basically states that death is inevitable and unavoidable, the second that it can happen at any time, and the third that death is only the last part of life, not some mystical, explosionary finale. All three have elements which seem to say "appreciate life; it’s not going to be this way forever."