The Cenotaphs Of Conquistadors Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Unicorn on a low ridge over
An acrid prairie—I keep writing to you like a little girl:
You give me hope, like
Finding my mother's onyx arrowheads in the bathroom
And sending them off
To a girl who doesn't love me—Unicorn over
The city's dump,
Where the hobos are burning barrels and the sea gulls
Are defecating,
You are not even a swan discovering that the angels
Have nothing to say to you—
But your horn is like the spear of an albino swordfish,
One of a team who was lost to a fisherman's spear,
Leaving behind a bachelor who is always
Weeping—
You are like a blue ribbon won at a fair kept in
Tiniest bedroom of a trailer
Where there is never enough light,
The stray cats live underneath of, and the traffic
Streams by unending—
Unicorn, you are like that cypress tree transplanted
To the highway's easement for beautification
The road kill sleeps under—
Unicorn, you are the muse of a thoroughly middle-class
Artist
Who walks his little roads too early, and goes to sleep
In the middle of all of the wonderfully humiliated
Creations—
Who sees you in his un publishable dreams,
Wishing to obtain you and lay his eyes upon you like
A nudie magazine found across the street in his childhood
In a cemetery of junked cars,
As the Australian pines leaned in together,
The cenotaphs of conquistadors drinking the sand from
The dunes,
The billboards proselytizing to the kidnappers—
The canal heaped full of stolen bicycles and abandoned donations.