The World Began With Yes

UNICORNS   Girls love them even before they yearn for that twisted ivory horn.   Wistful for what they never knew, they braid the rainbow hair of tiny Unicorns.   Yet the Bible makes them symbols of strength.   Were they Aurochs or Elasmotheria, now extinct?   Why did God remind Job of his own creation of beasts when Job was at his nadir?   Did HA-SHEM mean that animals are stronger than those who worship them? You Bet!   & Maidens who gaze upon Unicorns as Unicorns gaze upon them are the fiercest girls in the red tent.   Come, then, with me to my own museum in Paris, the Cluny: Musee du Moyen Age,   & see the Unicorn gazing at his comely Horn in my Maiden's Mirror,   while she dreams erotic dreams— all tapestry— celebrating the five senses:   Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight.   Our Maiden feeds both Lion & Unicorn, forms of desire.   No wonder the tapestry exults   À Mon Seul Désir!   What more could Maidens want than the everlasting hardness of the Unicorn, tail upstanding, supplicant to her   virginity, hooves in her honied lap, eating sweetly from her cupped hand?   Oh Unicorn, come to me from your red forest of love & drink my poetry— The true trace of my Virginity . . .   Of course there are more than five senses!   Knowledge of Future, Past, Poetry, Song, Colors, Stars & Planets.   Stay, fragile Earth for Bette, my granddaughter, that she may know, the Unicorn of Love & Longing, the Unicorn   of Work & Worship, The Unicorn of Springing Hooved Imagination!   The Unicorn that licks her little hand!   That nuzzles her pink neck, that kisses her brown/blue eyes, that lies down with languor & longing.   Unicorns are hardly symbols, but lovers of our Little Ones!   Gentle, gentle Unicorn, come to my study in the green, teach my darling girl to grow with Fantasy & Passion, Plenty & Poetrys . . . That’s all she needs.