Picturing the Self

Ever since reading Seamus Heaney's
                                        Two Stick Drawings
I've been wondering
                    about The True Extension of myself
or more precisely, how we all
have always been in search of it
                              perhaps unknowingly.
I felt my formerly unconscious goal
(partner to that higher goal
                    of Hugh MacDiarmid's
The Unconscious Goal of History)
click into place
                    like love at first sight.

Sea, pebble shore and salt-encrusted groine,
a path through woodland shade, a waterfall,
a weathered rock that stabs
a vast array of inner forms to life;
a limestone knucklebone, the moss
and algae patterning a tree:
somewhere among these images,
a host of possibilities,
vague plots of shared identities,
the larger selves of larger sympathies.

This much grows clearer to me now:
I will not find my image whole
and in one place and time,
but scattered
                    and fragmented,
crying out
              to be assembled bit by bit,
a Gormley Quantum Cloud of parts
not meant to fit together
                                  neatly.          Not designed
to do so, but
a Sainte-Victoire, solid as it ever was,
an edifice
              of liquid shapes
all the way from Cezanne's Eden          from a Paul Klee
               or a fugue transposed
to shimmer in the darkened light
              of Hugh MacDiarmid's Stony Limits,
his multitude of shades of grey          his many shapes,
his unity          intuited,
no more than that,
a unity possessed by man          who is its keeper
whose natural extension it becomes.