Andy Kissane

It Begins with Darkness

People file into the room, find their seats,
fill up the air with chatter. The stage
is bare except for a leather couch
and a lamp on a chrome and Bakelite* stand.
It’s meant to be an old factory converted
to an apartment—exposed pipes, a ceiling
fit for a cathedral, polished oak floorboards.
A man dressed in black makes an announcement
about mobile phones. The lights go down.
I don’t know what I’m doing here,
I just know that this is theatre, my son an actor.
I hear his voice before I see him. It’s as loud
as the wind swatting at a loose sheet of corrugated iron
on the chook shed. When he comes on stage
he swears five times in the first minute,
all in the presence of a lady. I’ve a good mind
to go down and slap him about the face,
except that I’m sitting right in the middle of the row
and it wouldn’t be easy getting past all those knees.
Then I remember that he’s pretending
to be someone else, that this is his job now.
Soon everyone is laughing—they’re smiling
and nodding and taking in every move my son makes.

I’ve never been to a play before. It’s not
boilermaking, not the flying sparks from an arc welder**,
not the precision required for a submarine hull,
nor the relief of taking off your helmet,
gloves and apron, and enjoying the coolness
of a harbour breeze as you eat your lunch,
but it is, I guess, a different kind of trade.
I watch more, and it all happens before my eyes;
I can see that he loves this lady—
everyone can see it, and I want to say, ‘Son,
what are you afraid of?’ I want to reach out
and lift him up as I did when he was two,
riding a supermarket trolley
and screaming as if he’d just discovered
the power of his lungs. But I can’t touch him now
or even talk to him, and I have this feeling
that it will turn out badly, like the week you have
the numbers in Lotto but forget to buy the ticket.
The stage is dark again, and he’s not swearing now,
and the lady’s really pleased to see him,
and she burns this scrap of paper, and it flares up,
bright and yellow in the darkness,
and the flame flickers across his forehead.
I glimpse in my son’s face the unmistakable
features of my father, who is ten years dead.
Although the three of us won’t ever meet again,
I’m sure Dad would have loved this—a story
that takes a whole evening in the telling
and a small fire that leaps and glows
and transfixes us for as long as it burns.

ANDY KISSANE
*Bakelite: an early form of plastic used to make electrical equipment.
**Arc welder: arc welding is a process that is used to join metal to metal.

How does this poem explore the power of storytelling?