Prospero's Books Page #2

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Had I not four, or five, women once,

that tended me?

Thou hadst, and more, Miranda.

But how is it That this lives in thy mind?

What seest thou else In the dark backward

and abysm of time?

If thou rememb'rest aught,

ere thou cam'st here,

How thou cam'st here thou mayst.

Twelve year since, Miranda,

twelve year since, Thy father was the Duke of Milan,

and A prince of power.

Thy mother was a piece of virtue,

and she said thou wast my daughter;

8. An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead

8. An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead

This is a funereal volume.

It contains all the names of the dead,

who have lived on earth.

The first name is Adam

and the last is Susannah,

Prospero's wife.

My brother and thy uncle, call'd Antonio -

I pray thee, mark me that a brother

should be so perfidious.

He, whom next thyself

Of all the world I lov'd,

and to him put the manage of my state;

as at that time Through all the signories it was the first,

and Prospero the prime duke,

being so reputed

in dignity, and for the liberal

arts without a parallel,

those being all my study-

The government I cast upon my brother

and to my state grew stranger,

being transported and rapt in secret studies.

The Book of Colours

This is a large book bound in watered silk.

300 pages cover the colour spectrum

in finely differentiated shades

moving from black back to black again.

This is a thick, brown, leather-covered book,

stippled with gold numbers.

The pages flicker with logarithmic figures.

Angles are measured by needle-thin metal pendulums,

activated by magnets.

6. An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus

This atlas is full of maps of Hell.

It was used when Orpheus journeyed

into the Underworld to find Eurydice,

and the maps are scorched and charred by Hellfire

and marked with the teeth-bites of Cerberus.

Vesalius produced the first authoritative anatomy book;

it is astonishing in its detail, macabre in its single mindedness.

This Anatomy of Birth,

a second volume, is even

more disturbing and heretical.

It concentrates on the mysteries o f birth.

It is full of descriptive drawings

of the workings of the human body

which, when the pages open,

move and throb and bleed.

It is a banned book

that queries the unnecessary

processes of ageing,

bemoans the wastages associated with progeneration,

condemns the pains

and anxieties of childbirth

and generally questions

the efficiency of God.

Thy false uncle.

Being once perfected how to grant suits,

How to deny them,

who t' advance,

and who To trash for over-topping,

new created The creatures

that were mine, I say,

or chang'd 'em, Or else new form'd 'em;

having both the key Of officer and office,

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