Fiddleheads

Can you see them a split second before the metaphor takes hold, before your mind furls into a shape to meet the shape it sees? Metaphor is a trap they always slip. They’re caught for just an instant, before unfurling into something more alien, for which we find no cognate. Or is metaphor an aspect of what they are, that allows us to be in brief relationship? As if the heads of fiddles and the heads of young ferns are infinite lines in a cosmic geometry, intersecting only at this point.