Billy Ramsell

Poetry

1. / You ask for something beautiful

   

   

   ENGIRL

      But how?

      Now all the meridians have slackened 

   and the time-zones between us 

   put on centuries each hour?

               Now they’ve melted down the statue

               of the physicist in the square! 

      Now the lavender is burning in piles

   with the poppies and those little blue flowers 

               no one every really knew the name of.

      Now every atelier is shuttered 

   and every banjo skinned with dust 

                           in the department of silences.

      Now the database of wind 

   holds every optimistic kiss I settled on your belly 

               and Tarragona, our city of bonfires, 

                           our city of casual drug-use and vinyl

               has been consigned to the archive of snow?

2. / Lament for Esbjörn Svensson

   

   

   ENGIRL

   Play me something. Though you're not really here,

   with the rain tat-tattooing the kitchen window like a snare

    

   and the wind, the wind, the weary wind

   droning like the bass on Tuesday Wonderland,

    

   the heating creaking in the key of A, the fridge voicing

   the same two notes in perpetuity (I'm improvising 

    

   here for accompaniment; give me a break).

   I'll pour us both a finger of Knob Creek.

    

   And though you're not really here play me something: a slow

   progression on my flatmate's beat-up Casio

    

   then your hands jerking like manic crabs across the key-

   board. Or don't play. It's up to you. But play.

    

   For there's no one but me here in the lamplight.

   Or at least tell me what eternity is like:

    

   if it's a never-closing-club called The Hereafter,

   dead greats in the rhythm section, you tinkling like the laughter

    

   of sixteen-year-olds on a beach in late July, table-serviced boozing.

   Or if dying translates us into the condition of music;

    

   leaves us weightless, melodious, floating bars of thought

   uploaded like data into the mind of God.

    

   Okay fine. Let's not talk of prematurity and jazz

   but just listen to the silk rain fizz

    

   upon the rain that waterfalls the steps, tests drains,

   and strokes the bevelled slope of River Lane

    

   as we name the too-late, unmade albums

   (Fractal Birds, Jessica's Premises, E.S. Ah Um)

    

   your fan-club now will only hear in overhearings or in dreams.

   And I won't bullshit you, in the sweep of things

    

   your trio-intricacies, your carefully-sequenced records will endure 

   no longer than the muttering gap between main set and encore,

    

   no longer than it took the final chords to flow,

   like a receding wave, back into the piano

    

    

   when you played late and cranky in the Opera House,

   unsoundchecked, your sampler or whatever on the fritz.

    

    

   This stubby bottle's empty as your glass.

   I wouldn't bring this matter up unless.

    

   Though you're not really here it's time to go.

   It's easing off, I think. I'm sorry. You know

    

   I'm sorry but it's time. That's traffic and raw light

   spills through the curtain-gaps. It's easing. Thank you. And goodnight.

3. / And in that infinite humming

   

   

   ENGIRL

   Come to me.

   Come to me across the karst esplanade.

    

   I give you permission, 

   safe conduct over and through

   the wheat-quiet, the crocus trail,

   past the watchman’s hut

    

   to my blouse stitched from silences, 

   my sleeves manufactured from silences.

    

   You have leave, you can enter,

   scuff dust from your walking boots

   at my threshold east of the fields.

    

   Though you cannot leave

   for my house through the mesh-work of machine noise

   come to me. Though you must always be

   stationed within earshot of the train-yard,

   on streets built from humming and sirens, built without exit

   from gear-crunch and traffic-drone, come to me

   though you can never come.

    

   I will breathe carefully onto your nape,

   my breasts against your back, my copper form,

   as the breeze seasons hibiscus in my chamber,

   seasons the silences

   with salt from the gravelly shore,

   or just breathe like this

   into your ear like this

    

   so come to me. 

   Come. Come though you can’t

   across the ragged karst,

   the wheat that is buttery or dun. 

   My blouse is stitched with the quiet of the marram grass,  

   my sleeves with eight versions of silence.

   Come to me come.

4. / Glitch

   

   

   ENGIRL

   You were my one-hit-wonder of summertime.

   I was your throwaway B-side.

    

   I was the dreaded first week of September.

   You were the seaside. 

    

   You danced an adagio to the apple trees’ confetti.

   I watched from the terrace.

    

   I filled and filed each declaration in triplicate.

   You couldn’t care less.

    

   For transport you bridled a shaft of runaway sunlight.

   I was a slow bus to Carlow.

    

   You wore the faces of Cleopatra and Marilyn.

   I was Ken Barlow.

    

   I felt a needed, obedient cog of the world.

   You slipped its grid.

    

   I made my body its input; its servant and its terminal.

   You never did.

    

   I stacked every shelf in the-pea-and-bean section,

   made it a seven-deep banner of tins.

    

   You spent seventeen winters on the teal coast of Baltimore

   watching the teal waves come in.

    

   For seventeen summers you rode on their surfaces,

   from isle to invisible isle.

    

   I directed grannies, trannies, the fat mothers, the prams

   to the bread and the cereal aisle.

    

   From spindrift you wove a mandolin of such choruses.

   I twanged on a Jew’s harp.  

    

   They made stained-glass walls for the cottage you wintered in.

   I was the dark.

    

   Your glowing panes let me in, you were meadow I was bitumen,

   I blackened the least of your paths.

    

   You adventured, I hid. I endeavoured, you did. I remembered.

   Your saddle had no room for the past. 

    

   You were bright feet slipping free of the jaw-trap. 

   I was the vice.

    

   I know that’s you knocking on my 4am window

   You know I’ll try anything twice.

5. / Code

   

   

   ENGIRL

   This butterfly is stitched from information,

   the bright one hovering about your hand.

   Your skin that wears the green, green dress

   as you lazily tilt the watering can

    

   over the coarse-grained ferns and digitalis

   is made from information too.

   The butterfly flutters the digital language 

   that wove its double motif of blue.

    

   Remember lover you are made from data

   and unto bytes you shall return. 

   We’ll go into a city built from water when we die,

   into flowing computerised terrain:

    

   its droplet-towers, its terraces composed like clouds,

   its temporary gushing boulevards

   shaped from how many souls colliding, mating, separating,

   when the frost of each body thaws,

    

   its parishes manufactured from the branching electricity 

   that flows and makes you all you are.

   You will become like rain, like summer water poured 

   and pouring through the summer air. 

6. / Sound

   

   

   ENGIRL

   To render the ocean one needs a whole year

   with Zoom in freezing fingers on a quarter-mile of coast.

   Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature

    

   and not the peacock-palette painters swear

   he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes.

   To render the ocean one needs a whole year

    

   on the quay-side tracking the tide’s increasing stature,

   its drones and climaxes, the diminuendo when it shows

   sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.

    

   Nature plays bass-clarinet in a Barcelona pop-up theatre.

   In a polo-neck he solos the ocean. He tongues, he blows

   to render the ocean. One needs a whole year

    

   or centuries to capture even its least-most feature:

   like the boat-cove’s lapping, backwashed contraflows.

   Sound is the one true vocabulary of Nature,

    

   who’s lost in his MacBook, applying filter after filter

   to this day-long rock-pool’s jazz, its stadium of echoes.

   To render its ocean once needs a whole year:

   sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.

7. / Nuria

   

   

   ENGIRL

   I’ve scarcely sent for my aperitif

   -vermouth and lemon, a whisper of gin-

   when there she is again. Nuría. 

   The janitor’s daughter, I think,

   or the niece of the new tennis coach.  

    

   Unpractised in her skittering

   jink amid the deckchairs,

   she stumbles, skips, exhibits her beauty 

   with the novelty of costume;

   something rented and nonsensical.

    

   Sixteen? Seventeen? 

   She steps, steps to the very lip

   of the infinity pool, addresses 

   its soothed, smoothing parallelograms,

   its burnt-orange flatness. 

    

   Such indolent poise! Such torsion! 

   I almost nudge my mother 

   -who’s drowsing on the wicker-backed 

   recliner beside my own- 

   to partake in my astonishment. 

    

   For Nuría’s tensile, awkward form

   will arc in a copper parabola

   through the heat-freighted air, 

   will splashlessly transition 

   past the palpitating interface

    

   of water, will power and spear 

   for breath-held seconds 

   not only against the chlorine-scented 

   densities of water,

   but through seasons, very decades.

    

   Ah the scandal of it all, the tragedy

   when she comes up metres, years away

   with her sinews, her cheekbones lengthening,

   with her taut and indolent torso entre nous

   deferring to gravity already.

    

   Oh how her thighs, her sun-lapped shoulders, 

   -with each slowing, more effortful 

   step toward the shallow end- 

   will loosen, loosen, loosen  

   coming undone about their scaffolds!

    

   One can scarcely look or look away! 

   Until with speckled fingers 

   straining to grip, she’ll haul her thin bones, 

   her self-encumbrance up 

   the step-ladder’s breathless intervals….

    

   The pool is an amber, agitated doorway.

   Nuría’s still sixteen, still perched beside

   that clenched and tensile stillness.

   The waiter sets my spurious cocktail down.

   So it’s the usual today then Mr Cenas.

8. / On Not Being Gaudí

   

   

   ENGIRL

   Cruelty, Cadalfach, to be at this hour 

   hatched into the too-late world. 

    

   Your new blue eyes look out

   from your mother’s spent sleeping breast.

   You protest. You complain to the silent nursery

   in cooed incredulity 

   as if the news has already reached you.

    

   He’s already here, already thirteen, 

   his pen already a prosthesis,

   tracking narrative in lizard skin,

   rhythm in nest-weave,

   in runaway handfuls of honey and spawn.

   He’s contemplating flock-flight 

   for decades when he’s lost for hours 

   where his brothers’ blows can’t find him,

   tracing in the movement of starlings a billowy machine;

   a sketchbook in every feathery arrowhead.

    

   And yet you’ll believe. 

   You’ll credit the envious whispers,

   in the lecture-hall, in the apprentice yard,

   assigning you and he to the same dispensation.

    

   You’ll believe the sycophants and spoofers

   when your first commissions come in,

   who attribute to your palaces and his 

   a comparable panache 

   and backhandedly praise your restraint.  

    

   And when every slut and cutpurse drinks to your facility,

   in the dive bars of the China quarter

   amid the accordions, 

   amid the absinthe and the harlequins,

   you’ll believe them too, 

   heeding the opinionated whores who dub 

   your Casa Serra the finest in the city.

     

   Though when he pulls off La Pedrera 

   you’ll shun cava and brandy,

   jealousy’s clear stinging gin

   enough to bust the capillairies 

   at your cheekbones and under your eyes.

    

   You’ll continue to ogle floor-plans,

   your mind twitching and inverting itself 

   to engender proportion,

   to wince at the bromides and imbecilities of clients

   when you take tea at their summerhouses, 

   to micromanage polishing

   of balustrades and hinges.

    

   Until you know your works for can-trips,

   for doodles, mere bagatelles,

   when his holy folly rises up in the New Town extension.

    

   From under the awning of Bar del Codicia,

   daily between noon and two

   you’ll study that accumulating reef,

   that foolhardy upsurge, 

   until, on an afternoon when starched winter sunlight 

   polishes the dust-mist

   and damps the yammering construction sounds,

   you feel the cathedral enter you.

    

   Your two arms, unbidden, stretch and extend, 

   spastic, cruciform,

   as a transept’s length passes through them

    

   and you step forward, staggering,

   all heedless of the trams,

   of the children shunted away from your flailing topcoat 

    

   as you feel your own flesh coagulate,

   boil and settle into impasto,

   into curdling, agitated stone

    

   while your backbone’s ratcheted, elongated upward

   to let chameleon chapels evolve,

   ripple  and recombine,

   reengineer your cartilage  

   into spines their skin will climb on.

    

   And all the while you’re looked down on 

   by that terrible emergence

   by its sapling-spires straining 

   for the light above the boulevard,  

   for the inviolate, for the world’s fresh attic,

   their peaks, their swarming nativities

   insurmountable, grotesque. 

9. / Auto-Retrato

   

   

   ENGIRL

   My brother, for all that he’s fourteen years dead,

   refuses rest or sleep or sitting  

   but splutters as he gulps down cigarette

   after cigarette, as he hesitates 

   on the landing over and over 

   between panelled and teak eternities.

    

   Her slumber jumbled, quivering, meniscus-thin,

   in the brocaded back bedroom

   my mother snuffles, endures the re-enactment

   of her foreshortened Girona childhood;

   that nightly monochrome procession

   of debutantes and servants and inter-war priests.

    

   But they dream in a grammar of magenta,

   my un-begotten children in the nursery.

   They dream of birds and tortoises,

   the boy I feared and longed for,

   my daughter, all colours, all coltish humours

   and berry-brown limbs that never existed!

    

   I’ll spend another year here in my mother’s house.

   I’ll watch from her Gracia balcony 

   as the wind disperses gobbets of potential:

   piled-up bluffs of cumulus, scarps 

   that the moon-light glosses, that fracture, 

   stall, then in slow-motion reels disaggregate.

    

   Such deliquescence! Such delicious entropy! 

   My mother, in the room above my own,

   snuffles on the cusp of wakefulness.  

   My brother’s ignorant ghost keeps coughing. 

   I’m 37. All of my hours are crumbling, stratocumulus. 

   All of my dreams are anxiety dreams. 

10. / The Top 10 Luminous Mushrooms of Cerdanya Forest

    

    

    ENGIRL

    10 

     

    Pony browns -double trunked- are a tonic for shoulder trouble, for all known insidious ailments of the upper back. Chop them roughly where they flourish in their vestibular thickets. Without delay sauté them in leaf-light; on a skillet hot as you can make it, adding a fist of parsley and a few barbequed slivers of willow bark.

     

    9

     

    Avoid on pain of banishment candy kisses. Neither pluck them nor enquire as to the ban on their disturbance. Feel at liberty, however, to relish the concert of their pinkish spines, their pastel antiseptic coral that marks the forest proper’s border and beginning.

     

    8 

     

    Beware, too, of wren-settles. For the merest tongue-full of their salty chalk will abolish seven memories, scouring them –without vestige or residue- from the hippocampus’s most intimate folds. 

     

    7 

     

    Further in seek butter buds: tender polyps most delectable raw, their flaking flesh best savoured by a palette washed in brandy, best presented in ochre marmalade’s southern, sultry ooze.  

     

    6 

     

    Finch whistles look proverbial with their white-pocked red berets and are a happy mushroom, a party mushroom. One for a good time, two for a bender. Three to re-experience your favourite sexual encounter. Four and for a fortnight you'll dream only in magenta.

     

    5 

     

    The mushrooms known as boar droppings found their poet in Salvador Espriu who designated them 'magnificent and bobble-headed sentries of the forest's deeper zones'. No stew in all the annals of Catalunya, he declared, had ever suffered by dint of their inclusion.

     

    4

     

    Mary-shells are delicate sub-aqua-seeming flaps and will soothe most minor complaints of women -cramps, sore feet, distemper- but must be ingested unbeknownst to her.

     

     

     

    3 

     

    Black shamrock is much sought-after by a younger, more aggressive crowd with their faux-hawks, rags and nipple-rings. They gather in the deep forest clearings. They smoke it and are transported where the sweet wood burns at twilight near the well-head; where the men issue first from the crouched wattle dwellings, in masked single file, garbed as stags and foxes; where the ugliest marujas of the village offer kindling; where the girl-child closest to fifteen in age gives the first spark to the beacon.

     

    2 

     

    Almond-headed pig-pies: so preposterous a confection, in such revolt against likelihood as to render further counsel academic.

     

    1

     

    A scattered shoal; luminous, ridiculous, their fidgety brilliance snaring the eye, switching on and off in what you know is more than happenstance, sea sprigs beckon you inward, invite you through briars, through soil-breath toward the forest's dimming and innermost precincts, blinking like fireflies, like tentative tapers down their curved and convoluted path as evening settles. 

11. / Two Boys

    

    

    ENGIRL

    One finds oneself, despite oneself,

    looking up from one’s acidic, 

    barely adequate Grenache, 

    from a half-finished text entitled ‘Histories’,

     

    as they hold hands saying nothing,

    coming back from the ripple-less sea

     

    as they traverse the long and indolent 

    noon and afternoon 

    like supple frictionless sunlight  

    as if their calves, their carved torsos

    were manufactured from sunlight,

    from wave-lengths tanned and tangible

     

    at how their motion stills the terraces 

    of The Lucky Dog, Bar Ostía, 

    gives pause to the grizzled habitués,

    the daylong swash and backwash 

    of the mariners’ conversation. 

     

    And still the two boys lithely linger

    as if they have known no ignorant byways,

    no side-streets with stupefied 

    rancorous men, will enter 

    neither evidence nor pleading.

     

    And as they amble man-hand 

    in amiable man-hand

    in the direction of Admiral Cervera Street

    one browned boy bobs his mouth down,

    dips a slow and unexpected 

    kiss to the elbow,

    to the strolling muscovado shoulder

    of his companion,

    takes a lip-full of salt from that easiness.

     

    And the butterflies of rumour start absconding:

    flakes of hearsay, membranes

    barely-there but pulsing

    in their cornflower thousands

     

    from their colony of notches

    on the great pocked wall behind St Michael’s

     

    their pigments spelling the future,

    telling nothing whatever 

    will ever be the same again

    in all the precincts of Catalonia.

     

    They hesitate, hover amid the Saturday traffic

    then in their pullulating spiral climb the air.

     

    They skim level above the esplanade 

    and the Museum of National History,

    above the two boys

     

    billowing out, out over indolent shallows,

    beyond the sleek, gleaming 

    sloops and schooners

    until they’re only a blue plume vanishing

    until they’re lost in a haze of heat and spray

     

    then further fluttering further 

    as they ride the leisurely thermals 

    as they’re spooled across the teal 

    and lavender immensities,

    their tenuous wing-spans breaching 

    horizon after horizon

     

    straining to reach and reaching

    a schedule of quaysides:

    petrol-scented docklands

    and workshy, terracotta harbours,

    beaches that await their butterfly insistency,

     

    Montpellier. Naples. 

    On what more distant, yet more shimmering somewheres 

    will their tidings, their indigo gospel,

    their weightlessness

    have settled  on by morning?

12. / Things No Longer There

    

    

    ENGIRL

    Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl that’s been consigned to the archive of snow. 

     

    What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square and its tributaries: the future perfect or future continuous?

     

    I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it. 

     

    When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely; interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight.  

     

    We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing.  

     

    Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed. 

     

    They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues.  

     

    They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality.

     

    By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown incontinent and squelching, as the canker advanced with terminal facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior. 

     

    No plums any more.  

     

    When they come they come in the pre-dawn to confiscate recollection, targeting random apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears a xxxxxxxxxxxxxx helmet.

     

    No sausages. No tangled twisters. None of those lavender-remembering pears I’d bring in baskets for you every October.

     

    They’re unscrewing the street signs on Patrick Street and Denny Street.

     

    Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

     

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I can’t find my memory of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

     

    I wonder why they won’xxxxxxxxt or maybe can’t respect my memory.