Columbia’s spectacular disintegration as it hurtled into the earth’s atmosphere brings many thoughts to mind. Here is one: we are all traveling through the universe at a terrific speed, and Billy Collins’ poem "Velocity" (published in his collection Nine Horses) reminds us of it.

"Velocity" takes place one morning on a train rushing across the Midwest toward Omaha, Nebraska. Sitting on the train is the speaker, a poet with an open notebook, an uncapped pen, and "a little writer’s frown" on his face. This tiny note of self-mockery—don’t think I take myself too seriously—sets us out comfortably on our journey. This is not a "Poem" with a capital P—just a story about someone like you and me, with an empty page and "nothing to write about."

And then our poem/train takes its first little swerve: "except life and death and the low warning sound of the train whistle." He does have something to write about, after all—but he is avoiding it. Life and death seem like big enough subjects, too big, perhaps, too abstract. Where does one begin? And the train whistle—why is it making a warning sound? Clearly, a little foreshadowing here is letting us know that he did write a poem that morning on the train: this poem, and it’s probably about "life and death," and we’ve been warned.

And so, not wanting to write about abstractions, the poet looks out the window, and sees only cows and hay, items of scenery that do not interest him because they are "things you see once and will never see again"—another gentle warning that we, too, are going somewhere, and that we will never come back. Instead of writing about the cows and the hay, he doodles, drawing a picture of a motorcyclist racing along with his hair streaming back, then adding "many lines to indicate speed." And again the poem swerves, for the imaginary biker in the drawing is compared to the real locomotive "pulling me toward Omaha . . and all the other stops . . . before the time would arrive to stop." Both biker and train are rushing headlong into the future, until something stops them "for good."

We come now to those abstractions that Collins has been avoiding. Poets seldom offer abstractions. They offer cows and hay and bikers and locomotives and even Omaha, but what this poet really has in mind is this: "We must always look at things from the point of view of eternity." Finally he arrives at the place he has been avoiding all along, the poet in his seat in the club car, with his notebook and his frown, speeding forward toward Omaha, trying not to think about this: that we are all rushing "along the road of the world . . . down the tunnel of time," we all have "speed lines trailing behind us," even when we are standing still, because time itself is rushing past us at an unimaginable speed.

And now we arrive at the place where I find myself in this poem. I don’t ride trains much, or write that many poems, and I certainly could not draw a recognizable picture of a "biker with sunglasses and a weak chin." And have I ever been to Omaha? I don’t think so. But suddenly I am here in the next image, a "woman standing on a beach studying the curve of horizon." Not because this is the only woman in the poem, or because I have stood so many times on so many beaches. No, it is that word "horizon," for me the most important word in the poem, that draws me in and makes such perfect sense.

When I was in high school I attended several Bible conferences at our local camp, Cedar Falls, in the mountains above Los Angeles. At night we would hike out to "inspiration point," really a sort of wide bluff, to look at the stars and to pray, alone or in little groups. My most vivid memory of this time is of looking toward the western horizon and somehow feeling the earth hurtling through the universe, spinning on its axis, circling the sun, riding with our galaxy through the vast hugeness of space. Somehow those tiny points of light that I knew to be immense balls of gas at immeasurable distances gave me a sublime vertigo, and I did indeed see myself "from the point of view of eternity," catapulting through space like Billy Collins rushing "toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha." I could feel the speed lines.

As the poem comes to a stop, we find ourselves at peace like the little girl sleeping in her room, "speed lines flying from the posters of her bed," who ends this poem, the little girl who lies "perfectly motionless" as she rushes, like all of us, toward eternity. Collins’ poem reminds us that we are not standing safely on solid ground, looking up at the sky in dismay, but flying like the Columbia astronauts through space; and that for all of us life is so short, so short.

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