Andrew –
This may be your best poem yet!
Short but well structured, and with a metric pattern that so well suits the message. (Note the iambics which form all but the final line of the poem, and then that final line composed of dactylics, to stress the poem's final thought. Wonderful structure!)
Your emphasis on the "words" of poetry (first line) is also telling. The great poet Dylan Thomas was once asked, "What must a poet do to write good poetry?" His answer: "Love the words, just love the words." (W.H. Auden said something very similar). I think you chose your words very carefully in the composing of this poem, and it shows.
In particular, "… An image tries to find the light." Excellent! Free form in the first stanza, rhyming pattern in the second, again, excellent!
The Dylan Thomas reference also reminds me of a clever critical approach to evaluating poetry that I read once in an art journal years (more like decades) ago. I'm sure I could never find that article now, but the approach that the author used in it was ingenious. And I think it could be applied to you.
He maintained that poets and artists could be "paired off" in how their work, poems in the case of poets, paintings in the case of artists, evoked similar, comparable feelings and emotions in the observer when viewing both. That is, a certain poet's poems would produce the same kind of emotional response in the viewer as viewing the paintings of the artist would. To illustrate this, he paired off well-known poets with well-known painters (Dylan Thomas-Vincent Van Gogh, e.e. cummings-Jackson Pollock, Tennyson-Rembrandt are the only ones that I can remember now) to show how reading poems created similar emotional reaction to viewing paintings.
Andrew, to apply this approach in your case, I would pair you with Giorgio di Chirico, the twentieth century Italian painter, founder of the Metaphysical movement. For me at least, reading your poems evokes the same kind of emotional reaction that I get from looking at his paintings: a feeling often of a kind of strange but intriguing uncertainty, a kind of fascinating foreboding at times, but also with a feeling that something very important is afoot, and is about
to be revealed.
Examples of di Chirico's works:
www.art.com/gallery/id--a127/giorgio-de-chirico-posters.htm?pe=trueI really think this one is one of your best, Andrew, perhaps vying for being in the position of "signature poem," the one poem in their corpus that poets come to be known for.