To A Sea Unicorn Poem by surya raman

In Paris once,
where these things can happen,
across the street from the Louvre, I came
to a stand of walking sticks.
Against the window

of an antique shop,
they leaned like bare trees
in the Tuileries, as if to get out of the wind,
though they were indoors.
I knew the feeling.

I drew my coat closer
against the Napoleonic cold.
The canes swaggered no more. Out on their own,
they'd taken a wrong turn
from the past,

only to find
their walking days over.
The one with a cut-glass knob, the silver-handled,
and the one with a snake turning back
on itself: in their midst,

towering over them,
a narwhal tusk as tall as I was—
like the one I'd seen in a room where it was still
the fifteenth century. Where,
in the unicorn tapestries,

only the lady aged,
panel by panel, until she and I
were of an age too old to countenance a unicorn,
no matter how handsome.
Narwhal, sea-unicorn,

your four-footed,
goat-bearded ghost no longer walks
this earth, avoiding capture except by the artist.
Its horn no longer parts the folds
of a maiden's skirt.

Is this enough
to save you, my unlikely one?
The ocean of the north is yours, as it always was.
The ice spreads a blanket over it.
Water falls on water,

mille fleurs of snow
through which you surface in air
cold enough to carve, a whale with a tooth
that spirals into a tusk of dream—
no one knows why.