The first issue of The Date Book
is dedicated to Anita Hill
and Clarence Thomas,
champions of a confused union.
She testifies to terror,
holding still around a torture
of mind and mouth, horror
of prey, her prayer;
While he pushes his privacy,
a claim to dignity earned
in the white weal of scorn,
the depredation of race.
And watching, male and female
hearts grimace in our breasts:
grinding, beaten like escaped slaves,
mutual outrages recollected in tranquility.
They are human, sexual in front of everybody,
like the rest linked and lynched,
colored and bloodied,
gender's victor and victim.
In roles learned in a garden,
rerun on TV's stage
the drama plays serial episodes
before faces hooded in the blank audience
white and crucifying as any Klan
in the torchlight of crosses
watching late at night,
making them transgress for us.
The two emit painful musk,
matched Titans marking territory
at the outside edge of control,
what civilization cannot confine.
The connecting urge courses
strong as blood in intimate tissue,
the thicket of encounter.
It's a jungle in here.
It's a jungle out there,
men and women hunting,
their nostrils flaring in power
tumescent from hip to head.
Before the senators
the judges of the supreme court
witness honest myths:
teeth flash tearing muscle.