dad-shaped hole in plasterboard
Troy Wong
The first time you died was over the phone
on a school night, the rains blitzing darkly as a blood clot.
The second time was slower, mum’s junked emails
crying wolf about IV drips and palliative wards.
At lunch, an auntie’s hushed, urgent implorations
turning the food sour. Reach out to him, they said,
as if you were the finger of god aimed at me
and I was a common Adam eager for your divine spark.
A father may wish his son a childhood so luminous
it could be mistaken for the moon
but I’ve never believed in the man on the couch,
let alone in the sky.
No holy ghost stirs in my blood, only the threat
of your cancers, foreshadowings of the treatments
that shot your balance to hell.
The summer you crashed through the kitchen wall
I sketched your dad-shaped hole in plasterboard
on a slip of paper,
one slim proof of your existence
that’s since gone missing too. Even your likeness
is thinning from me like blood
diluted by a steady drip of water. Instead I am ageing
with some relief into my mother’s brother,
a softer, easier shape.
So the years draw us apart like a string from its bow;
so I am joined to you as tersely
as an arrow’s tail to its nocking point or a phantom limb
to severed nerves; so I have mourned your three deaths,
borne your two resurrections
and confirmed the absence of a third.
A father is a fragile thing; so is a white blank page.
I don’t know that I will ever be a father
or a vessel generous enough for the spark you
hoped to pour into me like so much moonlight.
I only know that you failed to become either of these
to me. Try as I might to reconstruct you
from your artefacts—a police helmet, a model tank,
boxfuls of yellowed journals—a picture of us
I fished from my spam may be the clearest we ever appear
to one another. In it, I see you, a man
walking at an arm’s length
from me, a boy half your size, eyes trained directly ahead.
TROY WONG is an Australian poet born to Singaporean parents. His work, written on unceded Dharug and Gadigal land, has been published in Cordite, Island, Australian Poetry Journal, and Solid Air. He has performed at the Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and internationally.
