Discovery of the Corporation

There will be no Ferdinand for this Miranda.
Jacqui will go on plying her wares
in the city, yes, taking the ferry
and fending off the pimps
as Beasley searches through
A Book of Water 
for a way to whip up the Sound into a storm.
Black Prospero is conflicted now
and ambivalence never led anywhere for him.
There will be no Ferdinand
because A  Book of Water is too antiquated
to address the subject of ferries.
No one among them owns a car.
A ferry is not like a ship.
Gerry tells Jacqui through Angel
on a trip unscheduled for Ariel:
Dear daughter, while employed to satisfy men,
curry favor that you might buy a car
or even better, settle for a loaner.
By the time you get here I will have found
a way to sink the ferry so you may find
your Ferdinand. If you can get a truck,
load it with wildlife that would love 
to return to the land they once came from.
Ideally, Angel would have with her a pill
for deer and bear, if there be bear
on the pre-dawn avenues; and a pill
for night birds to find in their eyries
and fall into Angel’s Ariel arms
to cross the water with you and wake here
in time to rouse a riot on the ferry
so very suddenly and with such alarm
a storm will follow.

Dee reads Beasley’s note. What would Poe do?
Prospero would know nothing of Poe,
though Poe would know of Prospero.
Dee decides to catch the next ferry 
to Seattle. There, Caliban will devolve
to become like the beast that rules the world.
Caliban will learn more of cities reading Poe.
Caliban will discover the new Prospero,
the one without humanity entirely,
the one who is too many to be one only.
What’s rich and strange suffers no sea change.
What’s strange will be rich but always ugly.

(3 May 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander