There Will Be a Light: On Friendship

“You have left me: with tenderness enough/ To cover the world for seven billion years.” — from a poem I wrote for J., it appears in Banshee’s latest issue.

“I wish we could live forever

Then melt into the sun

Melt into the sun

Time is gonna change you

Once it gets you on the run

Gets us on the run.” — “There Will Be a Light”, Ben Harper and The Blind Boys of Alabama

Thank God my friend visited today. I have been so alone, which is a choice, because the artist (and the Saint) has no other business than to be alone. Remember Vuong: “Remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world”? Last night my brother visited, his hulky body eating up my room. He brought me a can of malt, ever a lovely (though also deeply frustrating) guy. Before he arrived and after, I was on the phone with my friend, Haymoux; I had joked about winning a twenty thousand-dollar grant on my WhatsApp status and he called to say, “O, man!” I explained that the grant I won was my working gadget, I forgot the password all of a sudden, prayed on it with my uncle and it finally unlocked. That miracle is worth more than twenty thousand dollars. But we went on talking, about the dresses we have taken off, the dresses we would soon put on, and the peeling away that is time. I love my friends.

J. is lying in bed now. Above me a faint white rechargeable bulb is burning. I am facing the shadows of books. There is a painting of three instrumentalists on the wall, hung above the bed in which J. is sleeping. His legs are opened in bed, forming the shape of a parallelogram’s tipping side. He has moved his body. The living body is not sculpture, it is music. In the frail light, he is a shadow in my bed. And I am a vaguer shadow in the window’s glass. I feel so soft inside; were a baby to take a walk in my belly, I promise he would drown in the softness. Were a hand to dig, it would find delicate things but also sharp things. There is a bottle of light somewhere there. But there are also little rusty nails of anger, bitterness, hurt that I need my Lord to harvest. Because here is not their home. 

I asked J. if he would drink coffee. He said yes! I used to take Nescafé a lot, but I stopped. It was a joy to share a drink with my friend. I made him a cup, made myself some, which I poured in my blue flask, the only award I have as a writer. I cooked some food. My guy ate. (There is a brother on my street who always wants me to buy him gin, I told him my pocket is cheap; would he eat rice? So I served him some rice. He said, when I took it to him, “One love,” smiling. He reminded me of a night in Papa when a total stranger offered me a lighter to light my weed. I said I had spark, but I was touched by the move. Now I am crying, and I do not know why.) After eating, I gave him the cup of coffee. As we came home from the busstop, I had thought about adding milk and sugar in his coffee, but I forgot and served him the black thing, the way Rumi probably took his own some 700 years ago. (I suspect coffee, which was much stronger at the time, was how the Sufi poet wrote thirty intense and beautiful, at times sexually-charged, poems every day. Who knows?) J. lifted the cup and started turning it, peeping into it, as if to understand coffee by the act. “It is hot,” I said, he was about to drink. But it wasn’t the burning that disturbed him, it was the naturalness of the coffee. He said, “Ah. I no know. . .”

I was drinking water, just finished eating. I could not help it. I burst out laughing, peppery water spilled from my nose. And I felt ten again. It felt like I had swam in the sea and sea water was coming out of my nose. And I remembered Wisdom, my older friend when I was in Abidjan. He was an Igbo boy, looked like Goliath. He sold clothes in Adjoufou, their stall (he sold with his brother) was right in front of Discount, a “super-marché”. Wisdom and myself would go to the beach on our way back from school to watch unclad women (this is how I remember it). Once I almost drowned. Wisdom helped me. Wisdom used to buy me things at Discount. Where is Wisdom now? Is he loving someone? Do they love him back? Does he have a daughter? A son? Is he still walking this earth? Does he remember me? Does he remember me, my Igbo, Goliath-like friend? Hello, Wisdom. Your name has not died to me. See? I write now. Sell word-clothes. I dress longing in words. Dress time too. My friend.

I gave my friend milk and sugar and he had his “latte”. Over and over again, we both watched Ben Harper plus Alejandro Aranda’s cover of the titular song on the 2004-gospel album, “There Will Be a Light”, by Harper and The Blind Boys of Alabama, on YouTube. I have heard this cover before, but today I hear it differently. “Let the warmth of my love/ Dry away all your tears.” There is beauty in the world. There is joy here. There is music, guitar chords that wake that intimate silence that cuddles your heart. 

I have a few reviews to do, trusting the Lord for strength. I will publish a review of Bower Lodge by Paul J. Pastor before Tuesday. I will work on some other pieces. I wrote a poem around 3AM yesterday, borrows and alters a title from Cheswayo Mphanza, intertextualises, bla bla bla. “Toward a Discreet Biography of a Secret.” It begins, ““Ti n ba ni o jo, sho ma jo?” It was the last night of our life together, that life that felt like it would never end, an animal with so much fire I thought it could quench the silence of hunger.” Something is happening to my poems, particularly after I turned twenty-two, a deep clarity has overtaken my once-vague (?), anxious lyric. Who knows what will happen to your singing tomorrow?

But I know. I know this. “There will be a light. There will be a light.” My friends will dance in that light, will melt into the sun, and so will you. So will you, my love. Hear the angels leaping?