A mermaid, sublimated into shards
of ethereal glow, embryonic on the side.
Cartographer, sweeping plants along
inchways, measuring the martyrgold;
a stolid friar and dour worm of habit,
limbos on the hook of iridescence
while the new world folds, cobbled
into a jig of gravity, upstarted.
His aureole enrobes a bed of nails
catalogued as Laudem Gloriae, Dulia,
hypostatic as the honours raise stakes,
thrilling trails of platelets, corpuscles
nestling into myth, the place that waits
slung through a ring of planets. Palms
bedecked with parachuted threads
on which floats mystery, awarded
for historical agendas of fragility
your hypnotic reticule of scent;
intimate to me the woundedness of art,
the soundings of an unmapped start.