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There was a third man, and wiser still,
who built on water instead of sand or hill;
the rains, the flood; unmoored, he rose and fell
and shuddered to the rhythm of a deeper swell.
Three thousand years enslaved by our tropes,
the Salt of the sea spills bile on the hopes
of anyone who suggests that, while floundering with god,
he cast nets for more than shrimp or scrod.
“It’s a burden,” he cries, “and one I will toss
to the place where Coleridge rimed his albatross,
for what did he know? Or Shelley, who drowned
with Keats in his pocket and weeds wrapped round?
Why, the words which pulled him into the deep
proved as dire as the stones which pressed Woolf to her sleep.”

Here are a few notes about this poem:

Yes, it’s a sonnet: 4 + 4 + 4 + 2. It concerns water. It opens with an allusion to the parable of the two builders (Mat 7:24-27) which (in my opinion) contains an allusion to the story of the flood (Gen 6:11 ff.), and even if it doesn’t, my poem does. There are also ironic references to Mark 1:17 (“fishers of men”) and Mark 6:51 (“the wind ceased”). There is reference to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Shelley’s drowning off the coast of Italy in 1822 (a volume of Keats’ poetry was found in his pocket), and the drowning of Virginia Woolf who committed suicide in 1941 by putting stones in her pockets and wading into the river Ouse. Which is a greater burden? Words or stones?

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