#jayme ringleb

[mordere-diem]

"I’d tell them my father bunched the papers into a wad and stuffed them in my mouth. I’d say he dragged me by the legs through the parking lot, my hair sweeping up flowers. But nothing happened, really."

Jayme Ringleb, A Wedding of Jackals

[blessedrestlessness]

Some Recent Ruminations on Félix González-Torres, the Instability of Oeuvres’ “Relevance” and the Troubling of Ostensibly “Fundamental” Binaries

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 […]”

        Is the art of González-Torres any less relationally radical? Or any less disturbing of our binaristic impulses we’ve been instilled with and conditioned to preserve? More than any other contemporary artist, he seems to me to have (to borrow theological language) a “real presence”, “in, with, and under” his works, and yet his works are immeasurably queer in their conception (and execution) of “stability”—of object, self, and [“I/Thou”] relationality.

[sansura]

Threesome with Sea Monsters and Theft by Jayme Ringleb

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.

The waves go out and out. I am just another thing that loves them.

[ukdamo]

Love Poem So Tall It Ends In Heaven

Jayme Ringleb

A man I loved  kept a  folded square of    masking   tape   in   his   pocket     He  did   this      / only   for   a   year     His    masking    tape   was     bright orange and fraying    As evidence  / coroners   had   used   it   to   attach to   his    father’s    calf     the     rope his   father’d   used       /   This  man planted    the   tape     in   our   yard when   the    year   was    done   and from  it  grew  thirteen  beams      / From   these   beams    rafters   grew     Ropes uncurled   from  these  rafters and fathers  hanged  from the ropes     /      Over    the    fathers     a     roof blossomed        like         a       shield and against it a ladder leaned  / The ladder            was            so         tall the  man   I    loved    said    it  must have  ended in  heaven     And down     /  from the ladder an angel  scurried while    we    slept       In  its   mouth it  carried   torn   strips     / of    tape     The    angel     pressed      this    tape on the  calves  of  the  man  I   loved like   bandages       /  Each  morning I removed the tape     I  was   careful not to wake him     Each morning  / he’d    walk    through   the    garden of   swaying   fathers      He’d   kneel beside  our rosemary bush     / He’d rub its leaves in his hands  He’d ball his hands in his hair to scent it   He wanted           /   just      to       keep his earthliness with him      / In hell this is the only prerequisite

[dykehaus]

A man I loved  kept a  folded square of    masking   tape   in   his   pocket     He  did   this      / only   for   a   year     His    masking    tape   was     bright orange and fraying    As evidence  / coroners   had   used   it   to   attach to   his    father’s    calf     the     rope his   father’d   used       /   This  man planted    the   tape     in   our   yard when   the    year   was    done   and from  it  grew  thirteen  beams      / From   these   beams    rafters   grew     Ropes uncurled   from  these  rafters and fathers  hanged  from the ropes     /      Over    the    fathers     a     roof blossomed        like         a       shield and against it a ladder leaned  / The ladder            was            so         tall the  man   I    loved    said    it  must have  ended in  heaven     And down     /  from the ladder an angel  scurried while    we    slept       In  its   mouth it  carried   torn   strips     / of    tape     The    angel     pressed      this    tape on the  calves  of  the  man  I   loved like   bandages       /  Each  morning I removed the tape     I  was   careful not to wake him     Each morning  / he’d    walk    through   the    garden of   swaying   fathers      He’d   kneel beside  our rosemary bush     / He’d rub its leaves in his hands  He’d ball his hands in his hair to scent it   He wanted           /   just      to       keep his earthliness with him      / In hell this is the only prerequisite.

Jayme Ringleb, “Love Poem So Tall It Ends in Heaven”