Billy Ramsell Poems

I gcead do Kobus Moolman
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 anymore.

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

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

They're unscrewing the street signs on and

Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of

I can't find my memory of

they can't
...

To Norbert Valath
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 quayside 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 one needs a whole year:
sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.
...

We were in bed together listening to Lyric,
to a special about the Russians,
when the tanks rolled into Babylon.

For a second I could feel their engines,
and the desert floor vibrating,
in the radio's bass rattling your bedroom
as the drums expanded at the centre of the Leningrad,
as those sinister cellos invaded the melody.

We'd been trying, for the hell of it,
to speak our own tongue
and I was banging on about Iberia when your eyelids closed:
"Tá do lámh I mo lámh" I whispered "ar nós cathair bán
sna sléibhte lárnach, d'anáil ar nós suantraí na mara i mBarcelona.
Codhladh sámh."

But as I murmured "sleep, my darling, sleep" into your sleeping ear
I found myself thinking of magnets
of what I'd learned in school about the attraction of opposites,
that the two of us, so similar,
could only ever repel one another.

For the closer I clutched your compact body
the further apart we grew.

You have eleven laughs
and seven scents
and I know them like a language.
But what will it matter when the bombs start falling
that you could never love me?

Then you turned in my arms
and it was midnight again on the beach at Ardmore,
when the starlight collected in some rock pool or rain pool
among the ragged crags at the water's edge
and the two of us sat there
and we didn't even breathe
determined not to the disturb that puddle's flux,
the tiny light-show in its rippling shallows,
the miniature star-charts that for a moment inhabited it.

And you whispered that the planets, like us, are slaves to magnetism,
gravity's prisoners, as they dance the same circles again and again,
and that even the stars ramble mathematically,
their glitter preordained to the last flash.

You turned again as I looked at the night sky
through your attic window
and thought of the satellites
gliding and swivelling in their infinite silence,
as they gaze down on humanity's fumbling,
on you and me, as you sniffled against my neck
and the drumming, drumming flooded your bedroom,
on powerful men in offices pressing buttons
that push buttons in powerful men,
on the tanks, like ants, advancing through the wilderness.

Those pitiless satellites, aware of every coming conflagration
and what would burn in it,
knowing for certain in their whispering circuits
that, like our island's fragile language,
like Gaudi's pinnacles and the Leningrad symphony,
- even worse - like your teeth and our four hands,
the very stars through which they wander would be gone,

those brittle constellations with the billion sinners that orbit them,
extinguished in a heartbeat, absolved instantly,
as if your hand had brushed the water slowly once.
...

Christmas day, 4 o' clock,
Stumps of cloud, like yellowing tower blocks,
Lean over
The failing glimmer of Christmas lights
And the quays, that are utterly empty,

Except

For one dark otter, slick with river slime,

A shape

Made of dark Lee water,
Of thick fluid,
Of rippling muscle,

Swaggering, like any pedestrian,
Up the steps from the dry riverbed,
Across the silent street,
Past dim shop displays, shuttered windows,

Toward a car parked skew on the footpath,
Its engine idling, its front door open,
Its headlights ploughing the gloom,

And a girl, its solo driver,
Standing alone on the pavement.

She is innocent, beautiful.
She leans over the otter.
Her long hair hangs down

As a second slinks up the steps from the riverbed,
Like a hand sliding slowly
From a hip to a breast.
...

He'd only stopped in for a capsicum, yoghurt, some duck liver pate
when he saw it: Protect yourself from identity theft!

Keep sensitive personal info out of the wrong hands!
Somehow it ended up in his shopping basket.

That Thursday bills ribboned into the green bin.
Job done, he thought. Better safe than sorry, he thought.

Next week the device was next to the letterbox.
No sooner was the mail absorbed than he shredded it.

His wife chuckled. While she was out at the gym
he shredded her passport. An item a day, then two:

P45's and birth certificates, their daughter's dinosaur
pictures from the fridge. (This last led to some questions.)

Alone one Saturday, while the wife took little Caoimhe
to hockey practice, he fed the shredder their title deeds,

sundry photographs, her birthday card archive and their U2 ticket stubs,
twenty-five designer ties and a dozen from Dunnes that choked it.

He walked out in his shirt sleeves through the housing-estate, past the
half-built semi-d's, over the waste ground and into the woods, pushing

for days uphill toward its tangled centre, even after the path was swallowed
by brambles, nettle-nests and dried-out twisted sycamores,

trying to ignore the thorns that rent and reddened his trousers,
his foot-blisters, his stomach's whines, the topless and bony children

flickering among the undergrowth, the grey skin stretched over
their sloped, long foreheads, the way they moved, their giggling.
...

When it came to happiness she was a gourmet,
a connoisseur of small moments and extravagance.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.

She wasn't immune to love. But her need to stay
on top of things meant she didn't rate romance
when it came to happiness. She was a gourmet

of the ungraspable now, savouring on the spot, without delay,
what the rest of us reheat at a bitter distance.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.

I envied her of course, which isn't to say
her dance, her casual way, didn't leave me in a trance.
When it came to happiness she was a gourmet.

To recognise contentment was her gift, her forte,
sipping the nectar from selected instants
like a hummingbird. Free as jazz, she floated away

from me with the old line: Is there anything I can say
to make this easier for you? Not a chance.
When it came to happiness she was a gourmet.
Like a hummingbird, free as jazz, she floated away.
...

Because I am the greatest in his realm
your husband sent for me, left me alone with you in the inner palace

where, on pain of death, no man may tread.
My commission was to render your face

in silks and thread of gold, the most delicate of textiles.
Of course the inevitable happened (for the rumours

of your beauty weren't greatly exaggerated) and I set out to make your portrait
unfinishable. Every night I heard the women and eunuchs murmur

in the corridors: "Hush, hush, the master is working!"
when every night my work was withering,

stitch by ripped stitch, in my own hands. How long can I explain the delay,
my doings and undoings, this penelopian dithering?

Your face shimmers on the floor beneath me.
I cannot insert the final threads of vermilion, jade and blue

for fear that we have lift off before I can even step aside
and it carries me away from you.
...