Billy Ramsell

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.