'...even now, an old black ram
  is tupping your white ewe.'
                 -Othello

 The owl's torches gutter. Chaos clouds the globe.
 Shriek, augury! His earthen bulk
 buries her bosom in its slow eclipse.
 His smoky hand has charred
 that marble throat. Bent to her lips,
 he is Africa, a vast, sidling shadow
 that halves your world with doubt.
 'Put out the light', and God's light is put out.

 That flame extinct, she contemplates her dream
 of him as huge as night, as bodiless,
 as starred with medals, like the moon
 a fable of blind stone.
 Dazzled by that bull's bulk agaisnt the sun
 of Cyprus, couldn't she have known
 like Pasiphae, poor girl, she'd breed horned monsters?
 That like Euyridice, her flesh a flare
 travelling the hellish labyrinth of his mind
 his soul would swallow hers?

 Her white flesh rhymes with night. She climbs, secure.

 Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor,
 their immortal coupling still halves our world.
 He is your sacrificial beat, bellowing, goaded,
 a black bull snarled in ribbons of blood.
 And yet, whatever fury girded
 on the saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword
 was not his racial, panther-black revenge
 pulsing her chamber with its raw musk, its sweat
 but horror of the moon's change,
 of the corruption of an absolute,
 like a white fruit
 pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet.

 And so he barbarously arraigns the moon
 for all she has beheld since time began
 for his own night-long lechery, ambition,
 while barren innocence whimpers for pardon.

 And it is still the moon, she silvers love,
 limns lechery and stares at our disgrace.
 Only annihilation can resolve
 the pure corruption in her dreaming face.

 A bestial, comic agony. We harden
 with mockery at this blackamoor
 who turns his back on her, who kills
 what, like the clear moon, cannot abhor
 her element, night; his grief
 farcially knotted in a handkerchief
 a sibyl's
 prophetically stitched rememberancer
 webbed and embroidered with the zodiac,
 this mythical, horned beast who's no more
 monstrous for being black.