Looking For Unicorns

He could not read

   so knew from stories he had heard,

        how their horns were silvered in the glowing moon,

              grace and beauty past all things he'd seen.

So he looked for them

   in drab brownness of his dusty world,

        hoping in the moonlight he would spy

              a hoofprint saying one was very near.

Then once among the ostriches

   he saw grace upon the hoof...

       knew that he'd been right

             and unicorns were there for him to catch.

He sold himself entire

   that he might buy the sort of rope

       to lasso down the flying, silvered hooves,

            to make the unicorn be always only his.

But she shook her flowing mane

   in the moonlight where he lay, saying, "No,"

       a thing he was not free to understand,

            a thing beyond his heart to do.

And in the deadly hours of the night

   he rode a lesser, earthly mount

       who never sped where unicorns could fly,

            trying to dispatch the presence of a dream.

He rode the hopelessness of everything

   into the dust-brown land,

       leaving only hoofprints in his heart...

            greater hollows still within his mind

Where stories of the unicorns

   never find a place,

       and even dust-brown earthly things

            are gone...without a trace.

Jo Anzalone 4-7-2007

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