A Poem by Cindy St. Onge (for Virginia Woolf)

We are ever walking
to deep water, heavy

with stones around our waists,
sunk by the heft of the legend

that we’re images of God,

counterfeits of the Cosmic Knowing.

Each of us, an upright man

struggling to stand in roiling

eddies, eroding then to the river bottom,

sanding the banks with the grit of our souls—

a coterie of memory, of stories, of lives

we had dreamed we lived, before

planting ourselves into the marsh

waiting for purposeful grasses to grow

up from the jagged seams of our skulls

while rapids rush just overhead, where

we’ve created small turbulences,

the Ouse’s perch, unmoved by them.