The Epilogue Entries – No.4

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ONCE YOU’VE SEEN A UNICORN

∴

Once you’ve seen a unicorn,
your life will become a series of scans
across the horizon,

searching for the moving white form
that glints
out of the browned foliage
and dormancy of hibernating life.

 

If there’s a unicorn in your midst,
you might feed
and passively watch her from windows,
but not go near,
for fear our clumsiness and clamor –
our sizable mistakes –
would scare her away.

 

You might hunt her
and hang the skin
as a declaration of victory over such a mystery.

Sometimes it is easier to kill
than to sustain the pain
of beauty we cannot keep.

 

You might stare right at her,
and look away –

sure that unicorns
do not exist.

 

Once you’ve seen a unicorn,
though,

you might wait in the fields,

to become part of the grasses,
to breathe with the dirt,
to melt like the rain,
to burn in the wildfires
that pry petrified pine cones
and let the seeds fall out.

 

You might keep an apple in your pocket
as an act of faith,

 

and you just might –

out there –

see her again.

∴

 

 

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