“SOUL FOOD”

When I’m running on empty, Sal Paradise fills me up— a true friend not just on paper. Cookies and milk; cherry pies for two fruits bursting at the seams; one night when I still called him roomie he brought home after a late shift at Mana Foods a veggie wrap filled with collards and tofu in tahini sauce for my midnight snack. He used to be the cheesemonger at the health food store cutting up Bulgarian fetas and manchegos for a living, and he would bring those home, too, with a seeded baguette, mindful that I’m vegan and I could only nibble on those charcuteries for the sake of sharing. In short, he was thoughtful, and he cared about his perpetually hungry friend— and feeding him soulfully. Once years ago when I was stuck “On the Road” in Xinjang, China and didn’t have enough money to return to the States, guess who saved me? Also once upon a time in Nagusbu, Philippines, grilling baby octopus and flying fish on coconut husks smoking of oregano leaves to the delight of the locals (I was teaching poetry at the National Arts High School then and was on a random break just to get away), I wrote this question in the sand on the beach and texted it to Sal: Where do we go from here?

He was, needless to say, my existential brother and “life’s journey-mate,” we created our friendship all these years through the auspices of Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), also known as Jack Kerouac, “The Beat” drummer and God of our hearts. I have missed Sal since he left the island. We used to hang out at the refuge on Sundays before sundown, on a trail along a costal savanna a mile-and-half out to the river that meets the sea, and just sit out on the rocks not speaking but gazing at the marriage of terrestrial and oceanic events that run deep. He tripped whenever I did this fancy thing I learned as a lad with pigeons clapping my hands like cymbals and producing a resonant sound that had an echo-magnetic effect to the spectacular landing of these birds at the confluence like archangels as if I was calling them and they summon down on my command to drink brackish water and refresh and bathe in the intertidal stream. Sal I believe took a video of that “saintly” event on his phone and at the end of the day wondered how I did that, how the pigeons listened to me. I said, I don’t know, man, I was just trying to be a kid. Or like a "master" to own my game. Or my fate, in retrospect, that is still sounding off, beating out of my heart to the direction of the poetic stage where I can be truly home.  “What birds plunge through is not the intimate space in which you see all forms intensified. Out in the open you are denied yourself and disappear into that vastness. Space reaches from us and construes the world” (Rilke). In the story, Sal Paradise kept up with his “soulmate” but only and sadly “on paper” after parting ways, having to go where both needed to go separately following their own callings, writing to each other once in a while, but an umbilical had always tied them around each other in friendship wherever that destiny they followed took them, and in the end… thought of each other, thought of each other, thought of each other.