An Adequate Image

An Adequate Image

            "This moment of understanding, for which we’ve sighed.” - St. Augustine

The poet, rifling through his files

of experience with hopes to find

an image adequate to crystallize

the fluid verity, determines, 

after years of fruitless scavenging,

that he himself is what he’s looking for:

the poet, searching desperately 

to find the perfect image—more 

for sanity than anything—and forced,

at last, to come to terms that, like

the shifting target, it will always dance

around the mind's obscure periphery.

And having seen himself as that 

for which he’s sought, he writes, 

not yet content at having fully held 

the fraught totality, but satisfied that this

is not his calling—content, like Augustine,
to merely brush against it slightly.*

* The Confessions, p. 264