The Will: An Introduction to The Anguish and Vigilance of Things
by
Imru al-Qais
The poet is a grey eminence always sitting at an angle to the market of affairs, making notes, seeing everything, entering into every nuance in intercourse. From these notes come the poems, things distilled. The job of the poet is to agitate words so they yield their true core as does wine, to induce in the reader what each word is nakedly, that is, pure mood.
In these poems, Richard Ali presents his life as a patient on a surgeon’s table and there are no, have been no themes, to his life, as these poems reveal. There have been only a series of glances, his eye resting on this or that, his poems becoming points of emphasis, seeking to undress and pare away adjective and lie alike. My son is not naked in these poems. But these poems are a testimony to what is laid naked. He is naked beneath these poems.
A poem is a thing in-formation. Form is important; a woman’s hips widen and keep safe what is hidden. Just as a glance is an irregular thing; there is no science to it, no mathematics to how it falls. In trying to capture an emphasis in terms of mood, as a poet must, the difficulty is finding a form for what is by nature elusive. It is as finding a spell strong and nimble enough to say—stay, stay still until my essence is found. Richard Ali has allowed each poem enter the form of its nature.
Each poem is a record of a man crashing himself into the fluid story of his times.
The poet is a grey eminence always at an angle to the stairs. Ours has been the endless vigilance of things and this is our testament.
Ankara,
562 AD.
 
From The Anguish and Vigilance of Things 
Making It Again
(From Songs of Innocence)
 
There’s no mistake in the paradise of children, all errings
Are erasable: We shred a year and sheepish say—it’s just numbers
Yet here I bleed the blue from yesterday’s clouds, put distemper
Into memory, leaving our tryst grounds in chaos
 
Empty playgrounds are lures when love is done,
Bud of grace quarter eaten by the price we pay
A slammed door – another’s name – wanderlust
Absence becomes the now place where the other lives alone
 
I invoke fever in the creaking of swings, thinking
Of Christ. But you’ve gone to the devil and He, creation
By creation, undoes the deeds of our Father’s amen
Leaving us as children, a mistaken affair erased.
 
At The Start of Winter
(From The Woman God)
 
There’s no joy in the music, new aridities
Encroach, dunes overcome our palace, remnants of
Walls will be ruins underfoot. This site is nostalgia
Sands to be scapelled off, or not, as anthropologia
 
Were we ever happy? I am not sad. There’s a blanket
Of chill around my heart which longs still for beating
Butterfly wings and the laughter before the confidence
That laughter could be done without. Were we not happy?
 
I remember that day at my house in the slums
When i tilted your head in my palms, saw revealed
Neat cornrows of black silk on soft yellow scalp
Before the trick of time turned winter on us.
 
Suite of Blue
(From Songs of Darkness)
 
Days pass by like shoelaces
Dragging along, gathering sand
And mud
 
Wynton Marsalis plays
I cannot hear him like I used to
 
A cat swings with popped out eyes,
Someone tells a joke, someone is mugged
Death walks alone, singular, sickled
 
I was never there, there are no prints
In the barrenness behind me, an orphaned
Seashell, thrust too far from claim of tide
 
I am not here, I am not. Where I used to be
Rows and rows of dead tulips weep in the sun.
 
 
The Sadness of Love
(From Songs of Darkness)
 
This house
On a special street, hides from
Indifferent eyes. Colour the yellow of
Endless sunshine, sturdy the bricks
Of my experience.
 
Each mood was built for someone
Who stayed awhile: balcony where she loved
To laze and watch the sun lower
As I to her thighs; room of palms and incense where
She stopped a clock against her heart
So we’d live forever; room of rainbows and umbrellas
For the lover who loved laughter
And Pablo Neruda;
Room the grey for the child that died.
 
Sun fails now, shadows curl the intimacy
Of rooms I cannot leave, of this house my heart
I cannot escape.
 
Blood now thin
Fades to rose. Alone I flame the candlewicks
Capture in verse the sadness of love.
 
About the Author:

Richard Ali is a Nigerian writer whose poems were first published in 2008. He has served in the National EXCO of the Association of Nigerian Authors and sits on the board of Uganda’s Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation. A member of the Jalada Writers Cooperative based in Nairobi, his work has been published in African Writing, Jalada, Saraba Magazine and elsewhere. The Anguish and Vigilance of Things is his debut collection, due out in 2017. He practices Law in Abuja, Nigeria.