Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
My Father’s Pornography
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.
David Wojahn is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently For the Scribe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). A new volume of his essays on poetry, From the Valley of Making, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2015. His collection Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2004 (Pittsburgh), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Award. Among his numerous awards and honors are an Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, residencies from the Yaddo and McDowell colonies, three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. (updated 10/2017)
Wojahn’s “My Father’s Soul Departing” (AGNI 76) was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2014.