Fontegaia rambles on.

18

 
Something curls in pale fiddleheads,
filtering green cobras out of a dank
spring swamp.  L-shaped mountebank
in bat-cape, with cure-all meds -

 
green knight, al-Khidr, bold St. George
whose penetrating transverse blade
pierces the charade of winter
murk.  The hero's urgent

 
fatal geste... Effort of the mind 
to grasp the nettle of the crux of things
finds its analogy in his blind quest.  Wings
meander just behind eyelids... unwind

 
the shroud.  Outline, profile, silhouette -
winding-cloth of one slow-wheeling planet.
Through elliptical sun-paths, a chariot
of fiery thought - viridian alphabet

 
whose chrome transmutes the metronome
- monotony to optic choreography,
mantic morphology; lips tippling topology
until they topple from their Babel-dome into

 
Mare Magdaleneum (or magma-mare).
Shadow of the curving earth
(circle of a single mother's
brow) her precinct, everywhere -

 
the potter's fluid handiwork, the mind's
unknowing amplitude, the emperor's
surrender of a miniature hill-crown
town.  To her (evasive leaping hind).