The semiotics not of sex but of concealment, the lessons,
_     _the legacy of dark.
It’s a strongbox in the basement, a corner in his woodworking shop.
_     _Inside, a prostitute of
forty years ago is swallowing a massive, blue-veined cock.
_     _The man is wearing
boxer shorts around his knees, white socks. Another man,
_     _a black man, enters her

from behind. Her expression? Bogus pleasure, eyes
_     _histrionically wide.
The photographer, I suppose, is demanding she look horny.
_     _A few of the shots
are four-color glossy, most a grainy black and white. I’ve already
_     _said too much. What next?
The damp smell of the basement he so carefully panelled.
_     _No dialogue:

the father always silent as the men within these pages.
_     _How old is the boy when he finds them?
Twelve? Fifteen? Always the humid smell, his ears alert,
_     _waiting for the car door slam,
the front door unlocking as his parents return from their
_     _Friday dinner out. Yes,
he is touching himself. The photographs. This is not how I meant
_     _to tell it: start again.
In the bookstore, the shelves’ collage of body and genital,
_     _stacked up to the ceiling,
each book vacuum-sealed in plastic. From here across the room
_     _they’re a sheaf of postage stamps
from some debt-plagued island dictatorship, its exports baseballs,
_     wooden carvings, phalatelic rarities.
And I am Baby Doc, my shades and leather coat, my kingdom
_     Girls in Leather, American Erotica,

Hustler, Penthouse, Girls Who Take.…The air
_     _conditioner, hissing.
Background music: big band songs. The curtained booths,
_     _my quarters. I would like it
to stop here. This should not be written down. Another poem.
_     _What could it contain?
A playlet. Empty stage and spotlight, my father lugging
_     _the strongbox from a corner.

Spotlight: my father in his hospital gown, the day before
_     _more weeks of electro-shock.
If you look closely you will see him weeping, but I don’t
_     _know how to tell you,
can’t trust what I could say. I return to myself,
_     _and the curtained booth
and the woman’s face, crying too — the director no doubt
_     _goading her to grander

postures of orgasm, her blonde head thrashing, the film
_     _now wavering, flickering,
all the quarters gone. Then I’m paying for the magazines.
_     _On the car radio, white noise
of news and weather, Emperor Hirohito dying. He has not
_     _been told of his cancer.
Such knowledge, his doctors believe, will cause him
_     _too much fright. The Emperor has lost

a half-pint of blood, but today sipped a few spoonfuls of soup,
_     _his first solid food in weeks.