Best Fall
- Best Fall
was what we called a game we playedwhich had nothing to dowith a favorite autumn,somebody else’s gorgeous reds and yellows.
no, eleven years oldall we wanted was to be shotas we charged sacrificially into the fireof the shooter lying prone behind a hedge,
or even better, to be that shooterand pick off the othersas they charged the guneach one stopping in his young tracks
to writhe and twistaping the contortions of deathfrom the movies,clutching our bleeding hearts
holding ourselvesas we lifted—a moment of ballet—into the air then tumbledinto the grass behind our houses.
and whoever invented that gamemade sure it would haveno ending,for the one who was awarded
best fall by the shootergot to be the next shooterand so it went, shooting and being shot,tearing at our cowboy shirts [End Page 18]
trying our bestto make death look gooduntil it got almost darkand our mothers called us in. [End Page 19]
Billy Collins’s ninth collection of poems is Horoscopes For The Dead (Random House, 2011). He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY) and a Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute.
