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| JOEL TOLEDO |
| There Are No Happy Endings |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS POEM. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
| THIS IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |
| "Unicorns," she says readily, "the waves hide unicorns." The prince considers this for a moment then falls silent. They are sitting on the sand. It is dusk: the sun is sinking into the horizon, sprinkling fantastic dust on the ocean's cheeks like the important objective correlative established early. Or an attempt at figure of speech: "Their sorrow gives voice to the sea," she adds. The prince smiles at this, oblivious to the waves sobbing by his bare feet before retreating back to the sea, leaving the sand damp and shimmering. Fore! shadows of the night now assembling, he could barely make out her face. "The sea’s waiting for me," her voice, crumbling like sand, that overused metaphor you always find on the beach. Now the prince could see the sea brimming in her eyes, but he still doesn’t get it. “So will you stay?" I offer, the point of view shifting somewhere in the middle. The prince holds out his hand to touch her silvery hair. She shudders at his touch, a muffled sound escaping her lips before she steps away, just in time to avoid the deus ex machina: a giant wave dumping tons of seawater all over the prince. He staggers backwards, fumbling and stumbling and tumbling and just too much of the present progressive now for comforting his tense feet, jutting into the air like similes for cramps, or two phallic synecdoches. The woman, who is actually a unicorn herself (because telling might help) finds the scene funny. She snickers, then neighs the horse-like but oxy moronic, high-pitched neigh that all unicorns make. She gallops away from her person ification (into her unicorn self), leaving the defamiliarized prince looking more like a court jester than the stereotyped knight in shining armor. And you don’t get it because you’ve never read The Last Unicorn. You haven’t even seen the movie adaptation. You say Tolkien probably wrote it. Heck, you don’t even know what the initials J.R.R. actually stand for. You still think fantasy began once upon a time, and ended happily ever after. This poem is part of the collection that won First Prize for Poetry in the 2005 Palanca Awards |