#jayme ringleb

By James D Bowman 3

        In his essay “True West: Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger Reimagines America’s Frontier Myths,” Colin Dickey writes: “Rather than being a canonical masterpiece, Dorn’s book may fade in and out of relevance as the need arises. In 1990, Dorn himself reflected that there didn’t seem to be ‘any quarrels with that book because that’s so remote now. It doesn’t threaten anything.’ But in 2004, Steinhoff suggested there might be a newfound resonance for Gunslinger in the early 21st century due to the fact that, ‘once again we’ve acquired a paranoid and kleptocratic administration keen on imperialist adventures.’ / Another decade, another paranoid and kleptocratic administration, and yet again Gunslinger appears on the horizon.” The sociopolitical fecundity of González-Torres’ work could be said to fluctuate in a similar manner. It, too, lives “in excess” of any “moment”, whether that of its conception, its execution, its exhibition, etc.; rising and dipping with the shifts in civic consciousness and emerging noticeably when the need arises, not primarily as a criticism of the odious and endlessly lamented aspects of contemporary civilization, or even as a kind of escapist “antidote”, but as a proposal, a prescriptive suggestion, an “invitation” (in the religious sense) to “receive” [into our hearts] what it offers.

        In the same [September 2018] issue of Poetry Magazine in which Dickey’s essays appeared, the poet Jayme Ringleb, in a beautiful poem titled “My Husband, Lost in the Wild” conceives of a relationship with a man that troubles many binaries—between bodily integrity and dislocation, between presence and absense, between long-distance love and the irritation of imperfect (in this case absurdly so) close-proximity. It speaks of the husband’s eyeball, which he buried long ago (“on a dare, he said”) under a Georgian tree, and of the husband’s tongue, which he left as a tip (“slid under a mug / at a small North Florida diner”). Most poignantly, the poem speaks of the husband’s ears: “His ears / he’d left with me, / I told them / everything—words / I had invented for the color / of new moons, city names / I had given to four slender / ant colonies that had since / emerged on the lawn. / I told the ears Come back to me, / but they were unable to / relay these types of things […]”

Starfish between them fatten on tube worms trapped in the tide pool

rock gardens. Dressed like a schoolboy, the one mopes up to Devils Churn.

The other follows. The sea, caught in the cave’s throat, throws our voices back to us,

so the one lowers his head into the Churn, yells. The other moves shoreward,

where, underfoot, razor clams closed against him fracture and crumb.

Anywhere he steps, he is breaking some. Fagged crows preen,

gobbling fleas. An opened crab’s hand brings down gulls.

The one boy’s hands are rough as silt. He signals we sit.

He touches the other’s jaw with his blue fingers. Each believes he is a net

trapped in another net’s arms. A strand of the one’s unwashed hair

sticks in a hinge of the other’s spectacles. I am here. I loosen it.

Sea monster on sea monster drowning, rock pools break the sea that thieves

wrecked shells away as sediment. All of us are soon gone.

Jayme Ringleb