The Unicorn Rests in a Garden

To whoever wove the fence: I do not know your name, and nobody does. We know the designs were drawn in France and the weaving was done in the Southern Netherlands around 1500, and that you and your workshop used wool and silk and threads wrapped in silver and gilt. That is all. But I have spent an hour with your fence and I want to tell you that it works.

It is such a modest thing to have made. A ring of plain wooden rails, ochre and brown, hardly higher than the animal’s back, enclosing a patch of flowering ground no bigger than a cart. The unicorn kneels inside with his legs folded under him, his head up, his long twisted horn pointing at the sky. A gold chain runs from his collar to the pomegranate tree behind. And the fence could not hold anything. He could step over it. You knew that. You drew the rails low on purpose, so that every person standing here has to decide for themselves why he stays.

I counted the plants for a while and lost count. Carnations, a wild orchid, daisies, violets, wallflowers, things I can only name as small and red and starry. Scholars have identified dozens of real species across your set, so I assume you or the designer walked out into actual fields. You put the flowers on that deep green-black ground so thickly that the unicorn seems to rest on a meadow at night. Up in the tree, and again in each corner, hangs a pair of letters, A and E, tied together with a cord. No one has worked out whose initials they are.

There are red drops on his white flank. Some say blood, from the hunt told in the other hangings; some say juice falling from the ripe pomegranates above him. Both readings have defenders. I like that you did not settle it.

The tapestries are now at The Met Cloisters in New York, hung on stone walls far from the house they were made for. The wool has faded, though not much. The gilt still flickers when somebody walks past. I cannot tell whether you meant the chain to hang slack. It does. With thanks, from a visitor.